The world is full of similar people who are not connected by blood ties. How is it possible that two people, born and raised in different parts of the world, look like two peas in a pod? Is there a clear scientific explanation for this phenomenon?
People who are similar to each other and are not relatives - is this possible? It turns out yes. A French photographer once had a wonderful idea. He found and captured on film similar people who were not related by any blood ties. His name is Francois Brunelle. It took him about twelve years to realize his idea. The photographer tracked people with eerily similar features around the world and helped them find their doppelgängers. Some photos of similar people from the work of Francois Brunelle are presented in this article. Carefully study the proposed images and compare how many similarities there are between complete strangers who are not related by blood.
Every person in this world has 7 doubles
They say that every person in this world has at least seven very similar people. One can easily agree that this assumption is quite frightening and unnatural. It is hardly possible to find two exact copies on our planet, identical as two drops of water. Even blood twins have features that, at least slightly, make it possible for those around them to distinguish them, not to mention a stranger who lives on the other side of the Earth.
Not identical, but, nevertheless, incredibly similar people still exist, and not as rarely as it might seem. They live in different cities, countries, continents, and lead a completely different way of life. They do not have common genes, they differ in language and culture, but their similarity really cannot be denied.
Same appearance - same character?
We all know that there are similar people. Is this purely a superficial resemblance? Can a person and his counterpart from another country have the same character traits and type of activity? It would be strange and surprising at the same time. In fact, it happens in different ways. For example, there once lived in Rome an emperor named Maximin (early 4th century AD), and so, looking at his bust, you can see in his features the well-known dictator from the 20th century - Adolf Hitler. These similar people not only had the same facial features, but both were dictators in their time, and both died ignominiously.
It is quite difficult to answer this question; modern science does not have exact answers, there are only guesses. One of the most likely versions is the one that explains the external similarity of complete strangers by an identical genetic structure. For a reason that is unclear to date, similar people have exactly the same DNA.
These twins are also called biogenic. This means that their genetic material is the same, but their biological parents are different. It happens that people can be similar and live in different places at the same time and be the same age. Some may be separated by years, centuries, or even entire millennia. Natural diversity, it turns out, is not limitless, there are billions of people in the world, and there is always a chance of a random coincidence of genetic sets.
Secret relationship
Scientists believe it is quite possible that similar people are very, very distant relatives. Using basic mathematical analysis, one can make the following calculations: the average citizen, after eight generations, will be the descendant of 256 relatives who, in one way or another, are related by blood. If we imagine that 40, 50 or more generations have passed, the relatives will number in the millions. And no one knows where the genetic material will coincide and in what generation.
In card jargon, genes are shuffled like cards in a deck, but at a certain moment the same “hands” appear with minimal probability. Then doubles are born, people who are as similar to each other as two peas in a pod. Perhaps nature has its own plans for this, its own secret goals.
Search for doubles on the Internet
Today, on the World Wide Web, there are many sites with which you can find an exact copy of yourself among show business stars, great emperors and historically significant leaders using photographs. They are also looking for their doubles among the most ordinary people of their different cities and states. You just need to upload your photo in a certain format, and after some time the search engines will be able to find for you a couple of twins, or at least people who will be very similar to you.
Such sites are quite popular, because it is actually interesting to know, and even more so to see, your double. It's like meeting yourself in a parallel world. Before the advent of the Internet, this was almost impossible to do, but now there are a lot of active search opportunities, and why not take advantage of them?
Miracles, and that's all
Doppelgangers are a phenomenon that is interesting in itself. People are more or less accustomed to the similarity of blood twins and granddaughters and their great-grandmothers, but to meet a person who is exactly similar to another person who is not his relative, and who even lives thousands of kilometers away, this is more interesting.
Who knows, maybe in the future scientists will figure out how to use this quirk of nature. It is likely that the similarity of genomes can open up incredible prospects in such a field of medicine as transplantology. As biologists assure, the chance of an exact match of genetic sets infinitely approaches zero. However, partial copying of genes is quite normal, which proves that all of humanity is one big family.
Children are born similar to their parents, nothing can be done about it, genes take their toll. After the birth of a child, all relatives wonder who the child looks more like: father’s nose, mother’s eyes, etc. But these netizens went further and decided to compare their childhood photos with pictures of their children - the result is amazing.
20 people who proved that their children are their little clones.
2. “I repeated the photo of my father when he was my age.”
4. “My two-year-old daughter looks like my mom did when she was two.”
5. “My father and I, in 8th grade”
6. “In the upper left corner is my grandmother, in the right corner is my aunt, in the lower left corner is me, and on the right is my daughter.”
7. “Everyone says that my son is a small copy of me. I didn’t notice this until I combined our photos.”
8. “On the left is my mother in 1980. On the right is the daughter in 2014"
9. “In the middle is me, on the left is my mother, on the right is my daughter, and everyone is 7 years old.”
10. “I found a photo of my father in 1978, here he is 20 years old.”
11. “I came across a photo of myself as a child, and it looked like someone put a wig on my three-year-old son.”
12. “On the left is me in 3rd grade. On the right is a mother in 2nd grade."
13. “On the left is my daughter at 12 years old, and on the right is me at 12 in 1985.”
14. “I was shocked when I saw how similar my daughter and I are.”
15. “On the left is the son, on the right is the mother”
16. “One day dad found a childhood photo of mom and compared it with mine.”
17. “Photos of my son (2002) and me (1971)”
Hello.
The topic of doppelgangers has long haunted many people: some want to be like some star, others simply dream of finding a person similar to themselves, while others became interested in it just by chance. As a rule, these people (especially if they are not very good at computers) have one thing in common: they ended up on some site that promises to find their double, sent an SMS (most often the service did not even say that it would withdraw money, but simply under the guise of checking) - and as a result, instead of a found double, they saw a message that a search was carried out, the double was not found (and a certain amount of money was withdrawn from the phone...).
In this short article I want to tell you a few simple (in my opinion) ways to find your double using a photo, without any tricks or loss of money. So, let's get started...
What do you need to find a double?
1. A computer with an Internet connection (this is obvious 🙂).
2. A photograph of the person for whom you are going to look for doubles. It is best if it is an ordinary photo without processing by different editors (Photoshop, etc.). The most important thing is that the person captured in the photo looks straight at you, so that his face is not turned to the side or down (the accuracy of the search depends on this). Yes, one more detail, it is desirable that the background in the picture be some kind of neutral (white, gray, etc.). A full-length photograph is not needed - just the face is enough.
Option No. 1 - searching for doubles among celebrities
Website: http://www.pictriev.com/
The site PicTriev.com is the first one worth paying attention to. It's very easy to use:
- go to the website (link above) and click the “Upload image” button (upload picture);
- Next, select your prepared photo;
- then the service pauses for 5-10 seconds. - and gives you the results: the age of the person in the photo, his gender, and famous people who the photo resembles (by the way, the percentage of similarity is calculated automatically). The service is especially useful for those people who want to be like someone - they changed their image a little, took a photo, uploaded the photo and looked in which direction the percentage of similarity has changed.
Rice. 1. pictriev - search for doubles using a male photo (photo similar to Phoenix Joaquin, similarity 8%)
By the way, the service (in my opinion) works better with women’s photos. The service almost accurately determined the gender and age of a person. The woman in the photo is most similar to Phoenix Edwige (26% similarity).
Option No. 2 - searching for a double through search engines
This method will live as long as search engines live (or until they block the option to search for pictures based on pictures (sorry for the tautology)).
In addition, the method will give results more and more accurately every year (as search engine algorithms develop). There are quite a lot of search engines, I will give a short instruction on how to search in Google by photo.
1. First, go to the website https://www.google.ru and open the image search (see Fig. 3).
Rice. 3. Google Image Search
3. Then upload your photo and Google will search for similar photos.
As a result, we see that the woman in the photo looks like Sofia Vergara (the results found will contain a lot of photos similar to yours).
By the way, in a similar way you can find similar people in Yandex, and indeed any other search engines that can search by photo. Can you imagine the scope for testing? What if a new search engine comes out tomorrow or new, more advanced algorithms appear?! Therefore, this method is the most reliable and promising...
Where else can you look?
1. http://celebrity.myheritage.com- on this site you can find a double among celebrities. Before searching, you need to register. While it is free, it is possible to install an application for a mobile phone.
2. http://www.tineye.com/ - a site with a huge number of photographs. If you register on it and upload a photo, you can scan it for similar people.
3. play-analogia.com is a good site for finding doubles, but lately it has often been unavailable. Maybe the developers abandoned it?
This concludes the article. To be honest, I have never been specifically interested in or studied this topic in depth, so I would be very grateful for comments and constructive additions.
And lastly, do not be fooled by various promises about finding similar people via SMS - in 90% of cases this is a scam, unfortunately...
Some people believe that meeting your double is a bad sign, a sign of something frightening and paranormal. Why is this suddenly!? Not too superstitious people, on the contrary, consider this a joyful event that becomes a good memory. An excellent opportunity to meet people, communicate, and take a group photo, after all! From the outside it looks very unusual and evokes only positive emotions! Shall we check?
1. “My double unexpectedly sat next to me on the plane, and it later turned out that he was staying in the same hotel!”
2. “Just found my doppelganger, wow!”
3. “I bumped into my doppelgänger at my cousin’s wedding. She’s her husband’s sister, but we don’t have a family connection.”
4. One of these men moved to another city where strangers greeted him and called him John, and here's why
5. The party is not without surprises
6. Sisters? No, we just met!
7. Met at a music festival
You didn’t notice that these were two identical photographs in which their faces were simply swapped, right? 😉
8. Will they become best friends if this is the case?
9. These will definitely become!
10. Work colleagues
11. And these guys even have the same birthday, coincidence?
12. Another story about how strangers began to greet a person everywhere, calling him by someone else’s name.
But he had just entered college. I was probably scared!
13. “Met my “brother” at the bar, his name is Adam and he loves beer too!”
14. And these guys were once not even immediately distinguished by the girl of one of them, oops...
They were probably sitting at that moment.
15. Cheerful people should find each other more often!
17. “Come on, mom, quickly, who am I here??”
18. “Hurray, I’m not the only one!”
Recently, American scientists were able to explain where similar people come from in the world, and in particular, this concerns why the Chinese are so similar to each other. It turned out that the more isolated a certain ethnic group develops, the more similar its representatives become.
Michael Sheehan, who is an assistant professor of neurobiology at Cornell University, says that the set of genes that are directly responsible for a person's appearance is a kind of deck of cards in the hands of nature, and regardless of how it is shuffled, it periodically falls out a combination that has already been encountered before.
Why is this happening?
Scientists have determined that similar people appear because a certain number of genes are associated with appearance much more than with any other areas of human anatomy. Of course, scientists have not yet been able to determine which specific genes are responsible for the width of the nose, the shape of the face and ears, as well as other features of appearance. But one fact remains clear - if people who are not relatives to each other, but have an external similarity. They will also be similar to each other at the genetic level, and the genes responsible for a person’s appearance are an excellent illustration of this.
An interesting fact is that human faces differ much more from each other compared to body parts such as feet or hands. Most likely, in the process of evolution, a special emphasis was placed on the detailing of human faces so that representatives of a certain family could easily be distinguished from others.
Groups
In the process of evolution, several main ethnic groups have formed, in which similar people are found. The largest such groups are the Chinese and Hindi, and at the same time, accordingly, the maximum chance of meeting your double is directly within a certain ethnic group. In other words, it is virtually impossible for a Chinese person to meet someone incredibly similar to himself among African Americans. It is worth noting the fact that within the Asian group there can be a huge number of doubles, and similar people are found here much more often than anywhere else.
Such identity in certain cases reaches a level where the similarity is not only external, but also internal, since an almost identical set of genes can be present even in people who are not closely or distantly related.
As a rule, people who are similar to each other and have the same nationality are distinguished by a similar set of genes, since in isolated ethnic groups all kinds of infusions from even neighboring groups were minimized.
How many doubles can there be?
Nature periodically creates copies of humans, but academic science cannot reliably say why they appear, and only guesswork remains. Of course, the most common version today is the version described above, which says that people who are similar to each other have an identical genetic structure. For a currently unknown reason, several “versions” of a person appear, and yet they all have almost identical DNA. In scientific circles, such twins are usually called biogenic, since, despite the fact that they have different biological parents, they differ in similar genes.
It often happens that in nature a huge number of identical people appear in short periods of time, and incidents also occur when these intervals stretch for hundreds or even thousands of years. That is why you should not be surprised when you see a double of some famous classic or political figure on the street.
Mathematical calculation
Mathematicians also decided to take up this issue and contribute to the investigation of why people are similar to each other. In particular, the theory of probability was used, according to which the chances of a random coincidence of sets of genes are far from zero, because there are several billion people, and this number is only growing.
Some scientists say that the phenomenon of the emergence of such doubles is caused by the so-called “secret relationship.” Even if you use the standard one, you can understand that any person after 8 generations is a descendant of 256 relatives related to each other by blood. Thus, if we talk not about 8, but, for example, about 30 generations, then this will be a million people, and all these closely related ties are based on the transfer of genetic material. Due to this, to some extent, all people in a certain ethnic category are related to some extent.
Doubles of famous people
Interesting examples of what very similar people are like can be found in our country. For example, while Alla Pugacheva and Philip Kirkorov were spouses, the Diva said that she liked Nemtsov, since he was very similar to her husband. After that, many people really took a closer look at them and realized that they had the same ears, eyes, nose, and both at that time were curly and had a very cheerful character, but at the same time they had no even approximate relationship.
Historical counterparts
There are also doubles that are extremely far apart in time. For example, at the end of the 3rd century in Rome, the ruler was Emperor Maximin, who was an almost perfect double of Adolf Hitler, and at the same time remained in history as an extremely tough dictator. His death was as inglorious as that of a distant descendant.
The busts of Thebes Montuehmet (the ruler of ancient Egyptian Thebes) and Mao Zedong are very similar, despite the fact that the ruler of Thebes lived more than 700 years BC.
Makeup
Probably every resident or guest of the capital paid attention to the fact that on Red Square you can almost always meet doubles of Lenin, Stalin and a huge number of other famous personalities who earn extra money by taking pictures with passers-by. Also, similar doubles can be found in a variety of theatrical performances.
In fact, it often happens that similarity is present only in racial and anthropological types, as well as in the external design and proportions of the face. If such people are undressed and the makeup is completely washed off, then the similarity will either completely disappear or will no longer be so obvious, which is quite important. Of course, quite often various theater troupes prefer to hire real doubles into their cast, rather than just made-up personalities, as this allows them to make the performance truly unique.
How to find your double?
In fact, in the era of information development there is nothing complicated about this. Outwardly similar people can be found quite often on the Internet, and you can often see such photographs in the news, on some websites or on various social networks. There are already a huge number of precedents when people found their doubles on the Internet and posted photos for comparison.
There are even specialized sites through which similar people in the world can be found based on photographs. Some provide the opportunity to find your own double only among the stars, or while others expand the possibilities to the point that you can find your own double even among ordinary people from other countries. On such resources, it is quite enough to simply upload your own photo in a certain format, and then after a few days you will receive one or even several photos of people who are very similar to you. If you wish, you can find similar ones that interest you, rather than looking for your own double.
Similarities between spouses
Many people often notice that couples who live together for a long time begin to resemble each other, and some even become so similar that they are then perceived as brother and sister. First of all, many try to explain why people are similar in this case, by the fact that quite often we ourselves choose partners who are similar to us to a certain extent, but besides this, even over time they begin to become similar.
In the process of conducting research, scientists have determined that visual similarity is a fairly important factor in attracting two people to each other. In particular, it was determined that two similar people of the opposite sex are most often attracted, especially if they have similar facial features.
What explains this?
This is explained by the innate tendency that every person seeks someone who can be trusted and whom he “knows”. When we literally see ourselves as a reflection of ourselves in someone, we begin to automatically associate the person with those thoughts.
Even more interesting is the fact that people who are visually similar to each other are prone to long-term relationships, they can trust each other as much as possible and enjoy carefree cohabitation. According to psychologists from the University of Michigan, older couples who have lived together for decades also begin to become similar over time, because people who have a close bond often unconsciously imitate the different facial expressions and gestures of their loved ones.
Among other things, one cannot help but say that happy couples often have similar physical characteristics.
Genetics plays the most important role in this case, since people with different genetic indicators begin to attract each other much more, compared to people who have a similar genetic code.
Even ordinary people often notice, for example, that many women are often interested in men who resemble their fathers - this is a subconscious act of selection. Fathers represent young girls, and this model is subsequently subconsciously postponed and shapes the further choice of a spouse for an adult woman. This is precisely one of the reasons why quite often couples are similar to each other.
People who belong to the same religion, race, age and social class are always more likely to develop truly strong and lasting relationships. Subconsciously, they are pushed towards each other by the fact that for them culture, traditions and food habits are not any obstacle, but are only another similar feature.
If people live together for a long time, then they are more likely to eventually adapt to their partner, and these life experiences, according to scientists, are ultimately reflected in facial features. But no one has been able to reliably say why people are similar to each other.
