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Interest in the Atacama entity (or just Ata) is cyclical, the most recent spike coming in the Fall of 2014. Facebook pseudoscience peddler The Mind Unleashed posted a status update linking to a 2013 article about the Atacama entity which renewed attention to the anomaly: Since its discovery in 2003, the Atacama skeleton has challenged scientists to fully explain the anomalies in its structure. However, testing has shed significant light on what may have led to the specimen's puzzling appearance. Although the Atacama skeleton was originally thought to be tens of thousands of years old, testing revealed DNA that was modern, abundant, and high quality. Furthermore, matrilineal testing traced that DNA to the west coast of South America, not a distant galaxy. In 2012, Stanford University immunologist and microbiologist Garry Nolan took a crack at unlocking the Atacama specimen's mysteries. Nolan confirmed Ata was definitively human, addressing a nine percent DNA mismatch as likely the result of bad reads or machine error. He was unable to identify any genes linked to progeria or dwarfism in the sample, and other experts believe that the specimen may be a mummified stillborn baby. William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York, observed barely ossified and immature elements of the specimen's development and said This looks to me like a badly desiccated and mummified human fetus or premature stillbirth ... Genetic anomalies are not evident, probably because there aren't any. Nolan discussed what DNA testing confirmed about the Atacama skeleton, saying that: In March 2018, enhanced DNA analysis revealed that some previous anomalies were due to the degraded condition of the sample, and that the skeleton was that of a young human female:
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