Candidu-Godoy, a community of German immigrants in Brazil, is once again in the spotlight: scientists are making another attempt to understand why there are 38 pairs of twins for 80 families here - a fact that forces researchers to test one version of the phenomenon after another.
High on the hill behind Darleigh's parental home, Grimm knelt down and sipped water from a thin pipe from a natural spring. Like many of his fellow countrymen, the 19-year-old believes there is a mysterious mineral in the local water that provides an exorbitant number of twins in a "mile and a half square" area. "All this cannot be explained by genetics alone," says Grimm, also one of the twins.
More than 80% of the 6,700 inhabitants are from Germany: they began to arrive here in the First World War, tempted by the prospect of cheap land and a mild climate. In the municipality of Candido Godoy, the twins phenomenon is most noticeable in the village of San Pedro, with a population of 300, where the Grimm family also live. Historian Paulo Sauter, also of twins, was born here in 1964. His mother, née Grimm, belongs to one of the first eight families to settle in San Pedro back in 1918. But even now they all live in the old fashioned way - they communicate with each other in one of the German dialects, and the agricultural machines on their farm are still being pulled by oxen.
The outside world noticed the phenomenon of local twins only in the early 1990s - local authorities announced that San Pedro had the highest concentration of twins in the world. Reporters poured in here. The residents liked it. The sixth festival (biennale) of twins was held here last year. They erected a statue of a woman with a girl in one hand and her twin brother in the other, and established a "Source of Fertility" illuminated at night.
Like many other local twins, 22-year-old Fabian and Tatiana Grimm have posed for everyone since childhood. So, is it just that they have such heredity? Or is there really unusual water here? Or are there any special minerals in the soil?
Last year, Argentine journalist Jorge Camarasa published the book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America. And he suggested that the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele "worked" on the citizens of the city. After all, he fled from Germany to Latin America, lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, and died here in 1979. And the locals claim that Mengele roamed these places under the guise of a veterinarian, and then a doctor. And here's what's interesting: German colonists have been living here since the beginning of the 20th century, but it was in the 1960s, when Mengele began to visit here, that the "explosion" of the birth of twins was also noted!
Sauter, head of the local museum - "House of the Twins" - believes that no one has hard evidence: “People who talk about Mengele do it only to sell their books. Yes, he studied the phenomenon of twins, but in Germany, not here."
Mengele communicated with children in an amazing way: he could talk to them or even play, give them candy, and then pierce their heads with a steel pin or send them to the gas chamber. It was he who came up with the idea of cremating still living children. Of the 3,000 young twins, only less than 200 survived these brutal experiments. This is the kind of "doctor" who apparently dealt with the phenomenon of twins in Brazil. Was this where his experiments were crowned with success?
Promotional video:
Geneticists believe that the most likely explanation for the phenomenon of twins is the relative isolation of the village and incestuous marriages. Ursula Matte, a geneticist from Porto Alegre, estimated that from 1990 to 1994, twins were born in San Pedro in 10% of cases, while the average for the state of Rio Grande do Sul was only 1.8 %. Moreover, 47% are identical twins. All of this led Dr. Matte to conclude that San Pedro is an "isolated phenomenon" where some unknown genetic factors must be at work. So everything is still not clear here.
But the historian Sauter believes that natural springs, like the one enjoyed by Darleigh Grimm, contain a mineral that affects ovulation. “Until now, no one has bothered to check the composition of this water,” he complains, noting that not so long ago the city switched from spring water to well water, which, perhaps, explains the slight decrease in the number of twins. However, researching the sources is expensive, and Dr. Matte doubts the city will ever do it: “They like to be mysterious… - she says.