The Starchild Skull

The Starchild skull is an abnormal human skull allegedly found in Mexico. It is primarily notable due to claims by paranormal researchers that it is the product of extraterrestrial-human breeding. DNA recovered from the skull establishes it as human.

Introduction

        In the 1930's, in a small rural village 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, at the back of a mine tunnel, two mysterious remains were found: a complete human skeleton and a smaller, malformed skeleton
         In late February of 1999, Lloyd Pye was first shown the Starchild skull by its owners. Nameless then, it was a highly anomalous skull. He initially felt it would prove to be a rare genetic deformity of some kind. This skull’s symmetry was astonishing, even more so than the average human. In fact, all of its bones—most of which had human counterparts—were beautifully shaped. But shaped like what? Solving many questions that this unusual skull presented became his challenge. 

Skull Discovery

Sixty to seventy years ago an American girl of Mexican heritage in her late teens (15 to 18) was taken by her parents to visit relatives living in a small rural village 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. The girl was forbidden to enter any of the area's numerous caves and mine tunnels, but like most teenagers, she went exploring. At the back of a mine tunnel she found a complete human skeleton lying on the ground's surface. Beside it, sticking up out of the ground, was a malformed skeletal hand entwined in one of the human skeleton's upper arms. The girl proceeded to scrape the dirt off a shallow grave to reveal a buried skeleton smaller than the human one and also malformed. She did not specify the type or degree of any of the "malformations."

 The girl recovered both skulls and kept them for the remainder of her life. Upon her death they were passed to an American man, who maintained possession for five years before passing them to the American couple who now control them. 

Analysis

The skull is abnormal in several respects. A dentist determined, based on examination of the upper right maxilla found with the skull, that it was a child's skull, 4.5 to 5 years in age. However, the volume of the interior of the starchild skull is 1,600 cubic centimeters, which is 200 cm³ larger than the average adult's brain, and 400 cm³ larger than an adult of the same approximate size. The orbits are oval and shallow, with the optic nerve canal situated closer to the bottom of the orbit than to the back. There are no frontal sinuses. The back of the skull is flattened. The skull consists of calcium hydroxyapatite, the normal material of mammalian bone.

Dating

Carbon 14 dating was performed twice, the first on the normal human skull at the University of California at Riverside in 1999, and on the Starchild skull in 2004 at Beta Analytic in Miami. Both tests provided results of 900 years ± 40 years since death.

Front view of the Starchild skull (on the left) and the human skull (on the right).
Compare striking differences between depth of eye sockets and shape of temporal
area just behind outer edges of eyes.

DNA testing

            DNA testing in 1999 at BOLD, a forensic DNA lab in Vancouver, British Columbia found standard X and Y chromosomes in two samples taken from the skull, "conclusive evidence that the child was not only human (and male), but both of his parents must have been human as well, for each must have contributed one of the human sex chromosomes".Further DNA testing at Trace Genetics, which specializes in extracting DNA from ancient samples, in 2003 recovered mitochondrial DNA from both skulls. The child belongs to haplogroup C. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the mother, it makes it possible to trace the offspring's maternal lineage. The DNA test therefore confirmed that the child's mother was a Haplogroup C human female. The adult female belongs to haplogroup A. Both haplotypes are characteristic Native American haplogroups, but the different haplogroup for each skull indicates that the adult female was not the child's mother. Trace Genetics obtained nuclear DNA, which contains chromosomes from both the father and the mother, from the adult female, but was not able to recover useful lengths of nuclear DNA or Y-chromosomal DNA of the father from the Starchild skull, despite conducting six consecutive tests. The founders of Trace Genetics stated that "[t]he inability to analyze nuclear DNA indicates that such DNA is either not present or present in sufficiently low copy number to prevent PCR analysis using methods available at the present time."

Explanations

Potential explanations for the skull's unusual features, apart from the alien-hybrid hypothesis, include the use of cradle boarding on a hydrocephalic child,brachycephaly and Crouzon syndrome.