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National Geographic video link.
Last year Neatorama offered a link to a Telegraph article about a remote Brazilian village with, in Miss Cellania’s words, a “bazillion Brazilian” twins. Now Candido Godol will be the subject of an upcoming documentary in a National Geographic’s Explorer program.
The statistics are jaw-dropping: 44 pairs of twins in 80 families in a 1.5-square-mile area – a rate 1000% above the global average. Some scientists attribute this to a “founder effect” since many of these Brazilians are descendants of German immigrants who clustered in this remote outback area. Others wonder about environmental contamination or simple chance. The National Geographic program will apparently focus on the more tabloid-worthy “Joseph Mengele-was-here” hypothesis.
Via Reddit, where there is a discussion thread.
In a new book, an Argentine historian asserts that Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is responsible for the astonishing rate of twins in Candido Godoi, Brazil. Jorge Camarasa makes the claim that Mengele ministered to both humans and livestock of the town during the 1960s under the name Rudolph Weiss in the book Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.
The normal rate of twin births is one out of every 80 pregnancies. Link -via Reddit
