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Comment by sammalloy | Hacker News Reader

This article made me wonder about an idea I’ve been thinking about for years.

There are people who have prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, the inability to recognize familiar faces. I’m not exactly a super recogniser, but I have an unusual ability to remember a face.

Beyond these two extremes, would it be possible to recognize a face you’ve never seen before as a possible relative, and has such a thing ever occurred, and what is the mechanism behind it?

I’ve read stories about putative pheromones and such, but that seems to be somewhat on the fringe.

So to further refine my question: can we recognize (visually or otherwise) strangers as potential relatives in some way by sense perception, if they are closer to us on the cone of ancestry?

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On some level, yes: we can generally distinguish human faces from chimpanzee, gorilla, and other primate faces. In general, though, our facial recognition has some quirks that make more fine-grained identification of relatedness hard. For example if I shave my beard it takes people a moment to recognize me, especially if I do not give them any clues. Also note that if we had a reliable way to identify degrees of relationship tribal marks would be far less common since tribal affinity could be detected automatically.

In general ape facial recognition is oriented toward familiarity, not relatedness. This makes sense given the patterns of social behavior in apes -- fission/fusion social groups, individuals leaving their childhood group and joining a new group as adults, etc. It also makes sense given that establishing trust (or degrees of trust) is one of the primary functions of facial recognition, and people often betray the trust of their close relatives. Familiarity is also more general, since we are often familiar with our close relatives but can also be familiar with others, and the complexity of ape social groups requires a more general kind of recognition.

> So to further refine my question: can we recognize (visually or otherwise) strangers as potential relatives in some way by sense perception, if they are closer to us on the cone of ancestry?

Like being able to tell someone's race? It's imperfect and fuzzy at the edges, but socially constructed racial categories more or less correspond to clusters on the human genetic principal component analysis graph:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...

Somewhat related documentary: Twinsters 2015 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2980626/ It's good.

Im not sure if I understand you correctly. But that’s not uncommon where Im from. People will sometimes stop to ask you if you’re related to X sincerely you look familiar. The person doesn’t have to be a relative.

Example: I’ve had a 4th grade teacher recognize my uncle in a setting totally unrelated to school. He happened to meet my uncle and noticed a resemblance.

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