Vin Diesel, First Human Created by God? Meme Tweet of ‘Adam’ 3D Model Goes Viral

In a stunning development, internet users learned that the actor Vin Diesel bears an uncanny resemblance to scientists’ best guess of what Adam, the very first human who existed on Earth, looked like.

According to a tweet indie theater operator Alamo Drafthouse NYC posted Thursday, “Scientists at Princeton University have reconstructed this 3D model of how Adam, the first human being created by God, might have looked.” Undeniably, the image looks just like the action star of the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise.

The Vin-Diesel-as-first-man tweet rapidly spread across the Twitterverse, and currently has more than 125,000 likes and 30,000 retweets.

But (perhaps needless to say?) there’s no evidence of any such research project at Princeton. As Twitter put it rather clinically in its description of the trending topic, “Vin Diesel becomes the latest celebrity to fall into a meme trend of someone posting a picture of a celebrity or 3D-rendered character for humorous effect.”

In a subtle wink, Alamo Drafthouse NYC followed up its original post with the comment, “Just a reminder that we’re a movie theater, not an academic journal. That said, here’s our soundcloud” — linking not to SoundCloud, but to the theater’s landing page.

The joke was a riff on earlier viral memes, including one that purported to show a 3D model of how Joseph, husband of Mary, might have looked — which, it turns out, is the spitting image of Andre the Giant.