COMMENTS
Great post.
Maybe you could make this into a quiz? Put the 16 composite nationality pictures up without names and see who can match them up with their nationalities. I'm guessing people would get right an average of, say, 5 out of 16, or five times more than random guessing.
For the four major groups, I think at 75% would get them all right.
Good job, but: 1) when you say the European players were randomly selected do you mean from among whites or without regard?; 2) Doesn't the Saudi composite's significant Negroid admixture invalidate including it (via the Middle-Eastern composite) in the caucasoid composite? I think you'll reply you don't observe the one-drop rule but by "caucasoid" most people understand a race free of Negroid characteristics; 3) Tunisia isn't in the Middle East. This isn't just splitting hairs: the North-African branch of Mediterranean caucasoids may have more Negroid admixture on average than Levantines and Middle Easterners on average (Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, and so on strike me as less Negroid on average than the Mediterranean caucasians of the Maghreb on average), which goes back to #2 above.
A lot of these faces look really similar to me. Look at the German and the Portuguese faces - very close. Some are a little darker than others but in general they all look like they could be brothers.
I'm not sure about the validity of this method. Perhaps it's good for morphing two faces together but when you start morphing dozens maybe the resulting face reflects more the morphing algorithm being used than it does the faces it starts off with.
@ Steve Sailer
Dienekes did the guessing game thing with his European composites, and you're right, region was easy enough to determine, nationality a bit tougher.
@ Fred Scrooby
Those three groups were the only ones available. I think they're a pretty good cross section of the Greater Middle East (which includes North Africa). There were some Negroids among the Saudis and Tunisians, but I eliminated them (see the Gallery for the samples used). As far as minor admixture among Arabs and Berbers, there isn't much that can be done about that. It's part of their make-up now. Though I personally don't see anything Negroid in the composites.
@ Skeptic
Well, they do all belong to the same race, so similarities are inevitable. However, there's a lot of subracial variation (as noted). The only two who look like brothers IMO are the Greek and the Serb.
South Asian Caucasoids,don't they exist?
"South Asian Caucasoids,don't they exist?"
Not in the World Cup.
I think the differences would be more obvious if you were to composite the faces of women soccer players, as women have finer features. Personally, I can tell the differences between the swede and the greek, but much beyond that it becomes like trying to solve a magic eye puzzle.
It's funny that the polish face looks so much like the worlds strongest man champion from poland and the past pope. The compositer nailed that one.
Anyway, its football not soccer ,gee!
Where would you place these guys.No wonder South Asia doesn't have a football team, footballs for wimps 
http://www.kabaddi.org/spgm/
inde...pgmFilters=#pic
http://www.kabaddi.org/
Nice job. When you morph faces, does the program count the number of steps required? I have been wondering if genetic similarity could be at least approximated by counting the number of steps required to morph one face into another face. If that were possible, I wonder if the numbers obtained by comparing faces across the world would be similar to the genetic distance numbers available for different populations. Also, it might have applications in forensics.
The composites are a joke: you simply keep the same face and you make the ahir darker or lighter with the same facial features. How stupid can you be?
It must only exist in your dreams.
I just did a yahoo search "team picture soccer".
Just great job with the computer, computer composite faces, change haircolour darker and lighter and there you go. Post the team pictures of italy, greece, morocco, england, finland or any team from the middle east.
Your freaking composite pictures are as dumb as morons out here.
You stupid dumb southern europeans are as stupid as the morons who want a northern state in italy, the lega nord, what kind of idiots pretend that taking the same face with darker or lighter colouring serious?
Ah eliminated negroid elements, that's great, how about eliminating mediterenean facial features as well?!
just take the face of the poish player and make his hair darker, yes then he's portuguese. What kind of morons are you outta here? Do you ever leave your house? Do you ever go outside? Do you know how people looks like actually in the real world?
Do you think other people cannot see it because they never go on vacation, they are clueless about people's looks.
Well, most of you think that this guy is a moron. He's not a moron, he's Spanish. He has a bias and wants to be called pure white even though his ancestors could have mixed with other races.
In other words he cares too much of what racist people think about him because he wants to be just like them.
Are you referring to the site owner, I guess you are not referring to me right? I am Chinese.
Just like in my country there is a divide between north and south China, there is a divide between north and south europe. Some stupid morons think that "nordics are depigmentized southern europeans" or something stupid like that. There is a divide in genetic history between north and south europe. Go ask any genetic science professor about this. whether you like it or not, southern europeans are clustering in middle eastern populations more than they do in northern populations. What does that tell me: it simply tells me that middle easterners do not look "european" but so called europeans in the south look middle eastern. There you go.
Of course, none of the images have been falsified or manipulated in any way, incoherent "Chinese" guy. What you see is what you get. Sorry to have to challenge your assumptions like that and make you all mad. But that's life.
Great composites. The Dutch and Italian composites are so similar it's eerie.
Nice work. Skin color and facial features mean nothing. Unless you refer to them with a word and demonize that word.
"There is a divide in genetic history between north and south europe. Go ask any genetic science professor about this. whether you like it or not, southern europeans are clustering in middle eastern populations more than they do in northern populations".
This is actually false. Similar to saying that Eastern Europeans are Asians, Germans are Huns, Finns are Sami and Dutch all Jew. No such clustering pattern exists that clusters any european population closer to any non-european one, exacept we are talking about very specific markers that are more or less irrelevant for genotype and phenotype analysis.
Now, there *is* a clustering of Southern and Northern europeans in autosomal DNA. This is quite natural. To vent about "race mixing" in Spain in you own wishful thinking. More and more people are apparently set on making up in "genetic purity" what they severely lack in historical relevance.
You are of course free to dislike "southern europeans". I know several that look at anything up of the Rhyne as primitive barbarians with an eye set towards money and little else. I'm not one of them though (heck, I'm not even strictly southern european). I just find it funny that all this slurs are in fashion when a cold look at history will show that the whole concept of "Europe" is seeded in the Southern European countries, from the greco-roman genesis to the Iberian expansion.
I suppose this is a kind of "Revolt of the Foederati", armed with some dubious charts and idiotic historical concepts that will make any serious person blush.
Just *love* this weird logic that gets being applied: the guy is Spanish, he denies being half arab so he is taking things "to serious".
What a pile of crock. As some guy noted, I'll be calling Germans Huns, since *everyone knows* thay they *heavily interbred*. Heck, this is perfectly visible today, I would hardly call a good percentage of germans "european". And the beauty is, when they start disagreing, I'll just clamly state that there is no need to whitewash their historically undeniable Hunnish ancestry. They should be proud of it even, it's not a bad thing. It's history, some are Huns, others aren't.
Take germans and aplly any other. What I've written is also a pile of crock, BTW, but if I made a blog about it using those terms (note the "everyone knows", "historically undeniable", etc) I would raise quite a group of disaffected southern euro kids with to much time and to less critical spirit.
I don't believe the composite procedure is nonsense. The problem is that one can bring one's own bias into who is selected for "compositing". For example, the composite "Spaniard" is of fairly dark complection. But if you look at the skin reflectance table provided on the site, the skin color of Spaniards are essentially identical to those of the Irish!! What happneded? Subconscious selection bias, or maybe the color settings of the pictures that were "composited" were inconsistent or tampered with. Furthermore, Spaniards differ phenotypically depending on what region of Spain they are taken from. 37 % of Cuban-Americans, for example, who are mostly of Northern Spanish ancestry, have light eyes (green, grey, or blue)(my group gathered the data by direct observation of Miami Cubans). Also, Italians are generally darker than Spaniards, with blue eyes being twice as common in Spain (see Journal of Physical Anthropolgy- I think it's in volume 9), and Greeks and Portuguese are the darkest Europeans (not validated int he pictures shown here!!!). So, in the end, the compositor made some goof-ups, probably in his selection of pictures to composite, and perhaps also in not adjusting pictures for intrinsic darkness due to lighting, camera angles, etc. A good composite should have required a double-blind selection process and a large number of pictures. The technique is actually valid, and has been used before to illustrate that "good looks" is based on having an "averaged out" look.
Nordic? Alpine? Mediterranean? What is this pseudoscientific bullshit doing in a forum supposedly dedicated to "racial reality"? Cephalic index in itself is often a poor indicator of race! There exists absolutely NO Alpine race. Occasionally, high altitudes have induced the development of brachycephalic crania (it is oroven that cephalic index is largely environmental). This is merely a creation of nineteenth century racists (most notably William Z. Ripley). Similarly there is no such thing as a Nordic race. Clearly Balto-Slavs (Polish, Lithuanians, Czechs, Russians, etc.) are typically fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and red/light-brown/blonde-haired, yet are clearly not Nordic (Germanic type)). And there is definitely no Mediterranean type. Evidence suggests that Greek, Italic (including Spaniards and Portugese), and Persian peoples are more related to Germans and Celts than they are to Semites and North African Caucasoids. (See Cavalli-Sforza's research.) Essentially, the Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean scheme was devised by 19th century Eurocentric racists (proto-Nordicists) who believed that the original Caucasoids were of the Nordic variety, who at the present date represent the only pure Caucasians. They postulated that "Mongoloids" and "Negroids" hybridized with these paleo-Caucasoids (Nordics) to produce the Alpine and Mediterranean races respectively. This pseudoscience was used by right-wing racialist eugenicists and social darwinists in the US and Britain to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, and in Nazi Germany. Of course, Kkkarleton KKKOON came along and in his "Races of Europe" attempted to update this garbage, through research methods which were clearly dubious and selective, though admittedly unintentionally biased, and came to a conclusion, through his reductionism to the "infallible" cephalic index, that Alpines were Paleolithic Europeans and Nordics (depigmented Meds) together with Mediterraneans were of Mesolithic Near Eastern origin. Result, he painted a racial map of Europe with absolutely no correspondence to ethno-linguistic groups, and no basis in reality. Don't get me started on how obsolete and wrong Karleton Coon is! Yet even Coon recanted his "Races of Europe" and admitted his errors. Ironically, though the three-fold division of West Eurasians had its origins in Nordicist thought, in the twentieth century Afrocentricists are using it (with the original interpretation) to support their "theories". According to this interpretation the pure White Europeans (Nordics), were barbarians exemplified by the Vikings, Goths, Gauls, and Teutons. Europe was only civilized by Mediterraneans-Caucasoids with Negroid (Semitic, Hittite, Greek, Italic, Iranian) and Australoid (Sumerian, Elamite, Indic) admixture. Interesting how the same racist nonesense could serve an opposite agenda!
Pointless and atavic study wicth indicates what? Same face with slightlly different features? Is that it? Most of these considerations regard both preconcepted arguments concerning several populations.
I would say that the composites tend to do a pretty good job of capturing the general look of a particular country. I was able to guess quite a few without looking underneath for the country name. Croatia is dead on....I would know because I am half croatian and I am familiar with the look.
>For example, the composite "Spaniard" is of fairly dark complection. But if you look at the skin reflectance table provided on the site, the skin color of Spaniards are essentially identical to those of the Irish!! What happneded? Subconscious selection bias, or maybe the color settings of the pictures that were "composited" were inconsistent or tampered with.
The composite was made with the pictures of the Spanish team. It came out looking somewhat "dark" because those pictures are pretty dark to begin with. If you look at the composite for the British players, it also came out looking rather "dark". Actually all these players are "fairer" than the pictures that were used.
and what about the finlands and russians and urals races ...the be very intresting
The Portuguese, Greeks and Italians paler than Spaniards? Is this a joke?
Or perhaps you put gypsies (an ethnic minority) as representatives of the Spaniards?
Watch any Portugal vs Spain or Italy vs Spain to see how off this is.
Please correct.
This is rubbish. The photographs are darker in some cases. Also the pictures can be taken right after summer vacation or in december.
In the photos portuguese player Simao (a mulatto) seems paler than Michel Salgado (a pure Spanish Celt).
This is "composite" is really ridiculous.
Thats bullshit Spaniards are way whiter than greeks and most italians.
The Basque are dinaric and we are the original people of the iberian peninsula so many people from Spain are dinaric too.
wow why all u just began to study history again ? just see the europe map
see how small she is, and u think that nordic race always has been up ,in fuckin colder shit ..... noooooo even the most nordic men from sweden or from geramany has a mixture genes !!! and do you know were u really came from ... the whole humanity ???.... from africa
then were migrations from one side to the other in earth , nobody in this human race has pure genes ...
so , stop this idiot discusion about how white u are , because u always must have some ancestry from middle west or north asia in every centery u want !!! thats just stupid , and im not some black who have complex of inferiorety ....
sorry bout my patetic english , i know
this is ridicolous but i just get upset
The Portuguese Greeks and southern-central Italians are darker than most non gypsy Spaniards.
The portuguese have the highest african admixture, whereas in Spain it is negligible.
The photos have been manipulated.From them it would seem that Portuguese and Italians are paler then English.
Also it doesnīt consider who has just taken a tan(the World Wup is in june when players have been training for months under the mediterrenean sun)
This composite gives a very bad impression of the site (as been unscientific).
Should be modified.
With so many southamericans,africans and moors invading Spain,Spain is gona turn brown n the fuckin yanks will be able to keep calling southamericans "the spanish people"
Go to the section about skin shades in Racial reality. The data their contradicts these composites.
Correction: look at the right side of the page: "Skin Reflectance of World Population". It contradicts in the case of Spaniards your composite picture.
Dienekes did the guessing game thing with his European composites, and you're right, region was easy enough to determine, nationality a bit tougher.
This is the most ridicolous thing Iīve ever seen. The portuguese, 90% brown, are paler than English? Spaniards darker than Greeks and Italians?
The guy behind this is an Italian or Portuguese living in US, who has absorbed all the racial bias of the anglo culture.
can get the number of the Italian composite please? thx! lol...
For the middle eastern composite, you can not include Saudi Arabia, they are what you call Afro-Asians. They are not completely caucasoid.
If you wanted to have a middle eastern composite, perhaps a more realistic one would have been...Turkey, Iraq and Iran. 3 distinctly different ethnicities. Turkish, Arab and Persian within the middle east. This would have been much better.
http://www.spanishmodels.net/wom...omen/
index.html Spaniards darker than greeks n italians? check out the photos and the Spanish are only from SPAIN EUROPE.
To really demonstrate Caucasoid subracial variation, compare White-Asian mixes noting the difference between different Caucasian ethnicities. Rather than the crude, archaic Nordic-Alpine-Mediterranean model, you would probably find the most fundamental division within hub Caucasoids (including nearly all of Europe much of the Middle East, parts of Northern Africa, excluding the Indian sub-Continent, Central Asia, and much of the Sahara) to be a North-South split. A "Eurasian" mixture involving a Northern European parent would look different from one involving a Southern European parent.
Unlike mulattoes, who usually appear intermediate between African and Caucasian, having a mix of features; Euro-Asians tend to resemble one race or the other. A cross between an Asiatic and a Southern European (or Middle Easterner) would look Caucasian, whereas a cross between an Asiatic and a Northern European would look entirely Asian. The difference could be a unique-looking individual who may have the good fortune of resembling Catherine Zeta Jones, or a typically Oriental looking person.
Attractive white-Asian mixes are rare, and limited to Oriental mixed with "Medish" (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Arab). Half-Asian half-Nordish (Irish, Anglo, German, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Scandinavian, Russian, etc.) tend to look no better than unmixed Asians.
Only by crossing with other races does Caucasoid phenotypical variance truly become apparent.
The British average looks more like he's from the south West or Wales (like my family). On the East coast where I live now, and further North, they look a lot more Nordic..longer more angular face, more like the Dutch face. the skin is a touch to dark on the British face too. Maybe it was a lighting thing in the photos.
I agree with DC's suggestion, make it Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian for the Middle East.
At least remove the Saudis as they have clear negro admixture and are therefore not purely caucasoid.
Spaniards can be paler than central and southern italians but not paler than nort italians.
I witnessed this with my eyes.
It's the truth.
I have been in Italy and Spain.
North italians are paler than spaniards.
Then just look at the national teams.
spanish team is on average 1,68 cm against 1,81 italian national team.
Moreover,Italy has Ambrosini,Totti,de Rossi and many with blue eyes.
The only blonde in the Spanish team is Fernando Torres and he's not natural.
The portuguese population has in majour the r1b celtic gene just like spaniards and the rest of the atlantic countries have it to.
And quaresma, bruno alves, pepe they arenst portugueses, quaresma is gypsy and bruno alves e pepe they are brazilian imigrants.
More or less paler Italians, spainards, english, germans, russians, portuguese, romanians , etc.. are all whites in majour. And thatīs the thing that we should protect, our genes.
This cntradicts the reflectance chart, there spain is much lighter. Also, the saudis and north africans are mixed with negroid elements. A more apropriate sample of the ME would have been Iran, Armenia, an Iraqi Kurdistan. Those three regions are rich in old persian/indo- european stock.
it is a very well job. But for Middle East section you must add turkish, armenian and kurdish types. so that,it can be more useful for race-theory.
They all look alike to me.
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