![]() They tell so many fascinating stories about people and where they went. Now, I could stare at these all day I love them. The heavily teal Indian section (The middle part, from Hazara-Tlingit, are obviously not Indian). The Orange-centric region, which Haak et al arranged to display the movements of the Anatolian farmer people. This leaves us with Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India, and parts of central Asia/Siberia: Haak’s graph makes it fairly easy to rule out the groups that are definitely different (at least genetically.) The American Indians, Inuit, West Africans, Chinese, and Aborigines are distinctly out. (By contrast, the east Asian countries, which cluster closely together on the facial map, are mostly yellow with only a bit of red.) The European countries show a characteristic profile of Orange, Dark Blue, and Teal. This isn’t the full graph, but it’s probably enough for our purposes. This is actually not too surprising, given that modern Europeans are genetically descended from three different groups who conquered the peninsula in successive waves, leaving more or less of their DNA in different areas: the hunter gatherers who were there first, followed by farmers who spread out from Anatolia (modern Turkey,) followed by the “Indo-Europeans” aka the Yamnaya, who were part hunter gatherer (by DNA, not profession) and part another group whose origins have yet to be located, but which I call the “teal people” because their DNA is teal on Haak’s graph. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything at all, or maybe it means that there’s a lot of variation in European faces. Hungary and Austria are closer to India and Japan than to Poland or Finland. Interestingly, while some of the faces cluster together the way you might expect–China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan are all near each other, as are Belgium and the Netherlands–many of the groupings are near random, eg, Mongolia, Turkey, and the Philippines. Huang has taken some of the Eurasian faces from this set and gone through the effort of trying to quantitize their shapes, as displayed in this graph (at least, that’s what I think they’re doing): (Plus, I wonder why the Romanians are pink.) These composites of faces from around the world offer us some more data, though depending on how they were made, they may not accurately reflect skin tone in all countries (ie, if the creator relied on pictures of famous people available on the internet, then these will reflect local beauty norms than group averages.) (And I kind of question that data on the Finns: credit: The Postnational Monitor) Either way is fine, of course, though this would contradict most people’s usage. Of course, this implies that either Spaniards and Finns aren’t white, or Chinese and Eskimos are. If we use a strictly skin tone definition (as the world “white” implies) we can just pull up a map of global skin tone variation: source: Wikipedia But “whites” and “Asians” occupy the same continent, and thus shade into each other. ![]() To be fair, there are also groups like the Bushmen (who are more tawny brownish,) and the Pygmies who are genetically separate from other sub-Saharan Africans by over 100,000 years, but these are pretty small on the global scale. “Black” is actually easier to define, because there’s a pretty hard boundary (the Sahara) between black Africa and everywhere else.
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