Short Stuff: Atacama Skeleton

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. - Hi Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and set me the link, thanks. - Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. - But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratlev here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Show Game, on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. - I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines used cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airlines. The most Texas story ever. - Listen to Business History on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get it, your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Hey, and welcome to the short stuff I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. This is short stuff, which is off to a bad start already. - That's right, and this is the story of the saddest skeleton. - It is really sad. There's like five different reasons it's sad, but you can kind of understand a little bit why the skeleton would get so much attention, as soon as the adicama skeleton, and it was found in the desert of Northern Chile, adicama desert, and an abandoned town called La Noria back in 2003. - That's right, it's little, very small, about six inches in length, or 15 centimeters, and it has a very interesting shape to the skull, very conically shaped, and also has only 10 pairs of ribs, wherein we usually have 12 pairs, and so of course, right away, there were UFO people saying, it's an alien, it's got to be a tiny little alien. - There's no other explanation. - Yeah, look at that thing. Other people said, "Hey, not so fast." It looks more like a non-human primate, maybe a shapeshifter. We don't know from what weird place this thing came from, but that's just the beginning of the story. That's all I don't wanna ruin anything just yet. - Yeah, the skeleton also is not fully skeletonized, like there's desiccated flesh attached to tissue attached to it in some places too, including the face. And the reason why is because, like I said, it came from the adicama desert in Northern Chile. That's one of the driest, non-polar places on earth, and it can mummify human remains pretty easily. It's between the Chilean coastal mountain range and the Andes and the town of La Noria, which is situated in the desert, was once a nitrate mining town. I think salt-peter actually. - Yeah, that's right. You love saying salt-peter. Why are you gonna say anything else when you can say salt-peter? - Agreed. It uses a fertilizer a lot. So they abandoned the town in 1930s. I guess after they had mined up all that stuff. So it's, you know, long way of saying it's a very good place to preserve skeletons there, and just naturally, but not only that, but the ancient Centuro culture there had a tradition of mummifying bodies on purpose through their embalming process. So even longer way of saying that finding something out there, it is not unlikely that it would be pretty well preserved. - Yeah, and not the least of which because of the solar radiation there. Apparently it's higher than anywhere on Earth. Not a lot of water. It's very hot in the day. Very cold at night. It's just a perfect place to make a mummy. And so in 2003, the world first heard of the Atacama skeleton. Thanks to a guy named Oscar Munoz, who's a treasure hunter who said that he went to La Noria and found just sitting on a shelf in one of the buildings that atacama skeleton, and most other people say, "Oh, we don't think that you just found this thing on a shelf." - Yeah, most other people say he really dug this thing up from a burial site. So that's sad thing number one. And no, no, number one, as you're not just supposed to do that as a treasure hunter, that's not a treasure. Later on, that skeleton was sold to a guy named Ramon Navia Asorio, he was a Spanish business owner and just collector of oddities. And also, it just so happens a president of the Institute for Research and Exo Biological Studies, which is a UFO enthusiast organization. - Right. And so you follow just have like a fairly smallish community of people who will actually travel to conferences. - So it's not a big surprise that Navia Asorio met up with a guy named Stephen M. Greer, who is a very prominent euphologist. I think he must have come up in our area 51 episode 'cause I recognize his name. But he is very outspoken about trying to get the US government to disclose all of the information they surely have on aliens, their awareness of aliens, what really crashed in Roswell, all of that stuff. And when Greer found out that Navia Asorio had the Otacama skeleton, he was like, we have to figure out what this thing is. Can I take a tissue sample? - That's right. And that feels like a great place for a break. What a cliffhanger. - Yeah. - We'll be right back. - Hi Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan, just one page as a Google doc and send me the link, thanks. Here's the link. It's not his fault. My name is Evan Ralliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAICEO Sam Aldman. - There's this vetting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company, which would have been unimaginable with that AI, and now it will happen. - I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. - Oh, hey Evan, good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. - Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. - I'm Robert Smith, this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. - And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. - Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having an own. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. - First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. There's a lot of Mavericks in that story. We're gonna have Mavericks on the show. We're gonna have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. - And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Comic-Fedison and the Electrical Chef. Listen to business history on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast. - Or wherever you get your podcast. (upbeat music) - All right, so Stephen Greer has gotten in touch with Navaria, Sorrio, and said, "Hey, I got a plan here. Let's extract some DNA. Have it examined for this documentary called Serious S-I-R-I-U-S. It's inspired out of one of my books. We can figure out what this thing is like, you know, hopefully full bore and we can know for sure." - Yeah, and I guess the Serious got publicized enough that a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist, he reached out to Stephen Greer and said, "Hey, I can help you run a genomic test on this thing." "If for your movie, Serious, let's do this." And Stephen Greer said, "Great, let's, I'm sure that was quite unexpected." - Yeah, and another thing that was unexpected was they found that the DNA was, quote, "modern, abundant and high quality and is human, there's no doubt about it." So obviously this was not an alien being. They published this research in March of 2018 in the journal Genome Research. And what they found is, you know, the second, and probably most sad thing is that it was probably a little baby girl who died in the womb. - Yeah, and she was almost certainly still born. If she was alive when she was born, she would not have lived very long. And they, like, if you haven't seen the autochrome skeleton, that's probably a good time to go look up a picture of her. But the reason she has such an unusual appearance is because they attribute it to the really, like, disproportionate number of genetic mutations she has. You know, just one single genetic mutation can very easily alter a person's appearance. She had multiple genetic mutations, and they have no idea why, but they're like, well, this explains basically everything. - Yeah, and also it seemed like it was, you know, pretty sure that it's a preterm birth. She's very well preserved. So they're pretty sure that she's under 500 years old, and that's what I meant by fairly recent. But they said, they don't know. Like she could have died in the past like 30 or 40 years. And if that's true, then her parents might potentially still be around, and we have this situation where there could be parents. And even if there aren't, we have snatched this skeleton from a tomb of this little girl who died prematurely because of, you know, issues, like birth issues. And it's like the saddest thing in the world. - And not only that, people around the world are saying like, alien, look at this, obviously, and alien. It's like, no, these are actually congenital genetic issues, not alien. So yeah, you put all this stuff together. You just hope that the family is not aware of this. The thing that stood out to me though, Chuck, if she died within, say, 40 years, that would put her in the '80s, the '70s. And the town where she was found allegedly, LaNoria, it was abandoned in the '30s. So I'm not sure what she would be doing there. But I did see in a lot of different places that they're like, she could have died quite recently. - Right, yeah. Well, it was such a sort of outrage after they found this out when that paper was published in 2018 that Chilean Society of Biological Anthropology and the Chilean Association of Archaeologists both came out and were like, this was a really unethical study. Shouldn't have done it. It's against the law, first of all, under Chilean law, it's illegal to carry out archaeological anthropological or paleontological excavations without getting authorization from the Council of National Monuments, which wasn't done. - That's a big one. They're also like, by the way, give us our remains back. Let's repatriate her. And then a lot of focus came on to Gary Nolan and his group for even running this test in the first place. And they essentially understood. They're like, you know, you're right. This whole jam is quite unethical. At least in our defense, we did not handle the body. We've never seen the body in person. We got a cubic millimeter piece of bone to use as the sample. So at least there's that. And yes, we believe that this baby's remains should be repatriated back to Chile. So I don't know if they got all the heat off of them, but at the very least they were willing to acknowledge the ethical laps on their part for sure. - Yeah, I think that was a fairly stand up thing to do. But the body is not back in Chile. It's still in the possession of Ramón Navidad Osorio in Spain. - Oh, really? - Yeah. - He's got it still. I don't know that he's making any moves to give it back. And also I saw Stephen Greer disputes the findings that it was human. Yeah, anything else? - Just a. - That was a scoff if I ever heard one. - Yeah. - All right, let me chuck. Short sets out. (laughs) - Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. - Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. I'm Evan Ratliffe here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. - This is an I Heart podcast, guaranteed human.