If you’ve never met anyone who looks quite like you, don’t be sad; your doppelganger Panda might still be walking the Earth on the other side of the planet. And although there are over eight billion people in the world, it’s not improbable for each of us to have a look-alike.

Genetic scientists have observed that although the gene pool for all eight billion of us is quite extensive, it’s still finite. Assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University Michael Sheehan likens our genes to a deck of cards: “If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice.”

Interestingly, our facial features have the biggest variety of genes out of any other part of our anatomies. There are different colors and shapes of faces, hair, eyes, noses, etc. Some say that it’s because of evolution. We needed to distinguish between faces better so we know who we can trust.

We like to say that we and our look-alikes are “twins.” While people who have similar facial features may not be that closely related, they still might share some similar genes. Essentially, people who look alike are most likely more related than those who don’t. For example, Javier Bardem is probably more closely related to Jeffrey Dean Morgan than to, say, Jennifer Lawrence.

Naturally, those who share the same ethnicity have more similar genes. Arthur Beaudet, a professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says that it would be hard to find an Asian and a European who look alike.

“You find two people from similar descents who probably do, in fact, have a fair amount of genetic sharing when you go way back.”

Scientists say that we might be seeing more cases of doppelgangers now that moving around the world has gotten so easy. In the past, people lived in more isolated communities and procreated with those with whom they shared more genetic markers.

But with lines between ethnicities becoming more blurry than ever, there’s a bigger chance there’s someone out there that doesn’t look that different from you.

What’s even more interesting is that some doppelgangers might share more than just similar-looking faces. A 2022 study revealed that look-alikes had similar lifestyles. The researchers found that doppelgangers were more likely to have similar weight, height, smoking history, and education levels than non-doppelgangers.

Two aspects that were very different for these “twins” were their microbiomes and epigenomes. A microbiome is the microbe population that lives on and inside our bodies. And an epigenome is a collection of chemical compounds that essentially “tells” a genome what to do, where and when to do it.

The researchers also used facial recognition software for their study. Interestingly, the machines mistook exactly half of them for twins when the researchers compared the scores to those of identical twins. Turns out that only looking at people’s faces can’t determine whether they’re related or not, even for AI.

The researchers hope their work can help with diagnosing diseases in the future. “We may be able to deduce the genome of a person from facial analysis and hence use this as a pre-screening tool to detect the presence of genetic mutations associated with disease and apply preventive strategies at an early stage,” senior author of the study Manel Esteller of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain told The Telegraph.

In Ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that facial features determine a person’s character. The practice, called physiognomy (or face reading) supposed that if you had a high forehead, you were “sluggish”. A bulging forehead meant you were hot-tempered. But today, physiognomy is considered a pseudoscience, since it had pretty racist connotations and researchers haven’t found much evidence to support these claims.