The Village of the Twins

The distant village of Kodinhi, Kerala has a secret. Not a particularly hidden secret, mind you—it’s actually pretty hard to miss. The village’s claim to fame is the abnormal amount of twins born there. Kodinhi only has around 2,000 families, yet there are 250 sets of twins officially registered there. In fact, there could be many more—experts estimate there could be as many as 350 sets of twins in the area. It gets stranger. It is estimated that the number of twins born in the village is increasing every year, and no one really knows why. This is all the more remarkable because twins are especially rare in India—on average, four out of every 1,000 Indian births are twins. In Kodinhi, the number is 45 per 1,000 births. Doctors have absolutely no idea what is causing this strange phenomenon. They assume there must be some unknown hereditary factor at work, or maybe it’s something they eat. Until they find out for sure, the Village of Twins remains one of the strangest curiosities of perhaps the most mysterious country in the world

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