Hmm. The main reason I began the composite face project was to see if I could detect any significant facial differences across different states in the U.S. I figured that these differences, if they existed, would exist because of varying migration patterns between one state and another, and would be most apparent among black and white Americans. Basically, I was trying to determine (for instance) if I could detect any differences between black college girls from Conneticut and Florida, or between white college girls from Alabama and Minnesota.
What do we see here? Well, aside from the obviously different Hawaii face (Hawii is majority Asian/Pacific Islander, but the hair dye still shows up in the composite!) the Idaho girl is showing a rather broader face than I've seen in the Southeast. Frankly, I was expecting the same thing from Minnesota, but that's not what I got. The Lousiana face isn't really any different from other Southeastern states I've done, except the Lousiana girls tended to be...ah, more zaftig, shall we say. She looks a bit odd, as if like she has a unibrow, due to many girls wearing long bangs in the photos I used for the composite. I decided not to use photoshop to alter the image and simply posted it here as-is.
Looking at the demographic data, Idaho turns out to be not as German as I thought; instead, it's primarily Anglo-English. The south of Idaho is also very Mormon, but I wasn't able to check the religious background of the girls whose pics I used for the composite. Mormons don't have a slightly different phenotype from Southeasterners...do they? I know the late 19th-century Mormons absorbed a lot of Scandinavian and German immigrants, but that's the only thing I can think of to account for the Idaho girl's look.
As for MN, I guess that's a sort of Nordic look--long, narrow face. Minnesota's white background is very diverse, including virtually every nationality from northern and eastern Europe. The state also has the largest concentration of French-Canadians outside of New England, and I wonder if the composite is showing their influence a bit.
Oh god no, Quebeckers are the hideous rednecks and hicks of the French-speaking world.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to see what Quebeckers look like, get a composite of Maine.
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ReplyDeleteIdaho is basically a quarter to a half Mormon, while Utah is mostly Mormon. And yes, Mormons are a different ethnic group from non-Mormons, quite shockingly so, in fact... they don't overlap much. The top three ancestry groups for Mormons are English, Danish, and Swedish; for non-Mormons, it's German, Irish, and Norwegian. (There is also some amount of each group's top three in the other's gene pool, but it isn't nearly as prominent.)
ReplyDeleteSo... if you want Mormon Idahoans, check out the Utah composite; for non-Mormon Idahoans, more like Montana, Wyoming, or Washington state.
Minnesota: Should be a clean composite of Germanicness. Minnesota is about half German, and a quarter Norwegian and Swedish.