Absolutely maximally entangled, AME, states are pure multi partite states that give rise to the maximally mixed states when half or more of the parties are traced out. AME states find applications in fields like teleportation or quantum secret sharing, and the problem of finding conditions on their existence has been considered in a number of papers. We consider here AME states of minimal support, that are simpler to analyse. An equivalence with coding theory gives a sufficient condition for their existence, that the number of sites be equal to the local dimension plus one, when the local dimension $d$ is a power of a prime number. In this paper, an equivalence with latin hypercubes is used to prove that the above sufficient condition fails in the first case in which the local dimension is not a prime power, $d = 6$. Results for other values of $d$ are also given.