My experiment: guessing ethnicity from photos

[Antilogic]

You have a sample size of 1, your margin of error is 100%.

Yeah, the only thing you can do is calculate this guy's miss rate. Which is kinda funny.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I went to the first link to vote and didn't see any way to indicate my choice for any of the pictures.

 

[Borachio]

I've examined every one of these photos very carefully.

Here are my results, numbered by their appearance in the sequence:

#1. A black person.
#2. Another black person.
#3. And another black person.
#4. And another black person.
#5. And another black person.
#6. And another black person.
.....
*yawn*

....
#909. And another black person.
#910. Oooh, a white person. (Don't know how that one slipped in.)
#911. And another black person.
#912. And another black person.

I'd say your sample represents a surprisingly large number of black people, all things considered. But of course, I'm no expert.

 

[Agent327]

So I did an experiment:

I gathered 912 photos of 912 Germans and Poles, and I asked people to label each photo with "G" or "P", to see if they can distinguish ethnicity.

My sample of 912 was probably as representative as it could be (I can't imagine a more representative sample, but I won't reveal why yet).

So far only one American guy - who is of Basque ancestry, who is a teacher, and who travels a lot (he claims that he visited Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain) - volunteered to solve my poll.

He omitted several individuals, but generally he labelled most of them (around 900).

His results were as follows:

Out of all Germans, he identified 56.608 percent as Germans and 42.952 percent as Poles.

Out of all Poles, he identified 54.625 percent as Germans (!) and 44.323 percent as Poles.

I'm not sure what to think of these results.

I'd say that, rather predictably, the results are utterly inconclusive. Not that you could soundly draw any conclusions on one respondent, but your experiment seems to have failed.

Phrenology is an abandoned 'science', by the way.

 

[Domen]

I went to the first link to vote and didn't see any way to indicate my choice for any of the pictures.

You can open the files in MS Paint - put a "G" on each German, a "P" on each Pole.

I've examined every one of these photos very carefully.

Here are my results, numbered by their appearance in the sequence:

#1. A black person.
#2. Another black person.
#3. And another black person.
#4. And another black person.
#5. And another black person.
#6. And another black person.
.....
*yawn*

....
#909. And another black person.
#910. Oooh, a white person. (Don't know how that one slipped in.)
#911. And another black person.
#912. And another black person.

I'd say your sample represents a surprisingly large number of black people, all things considered. But of course, I'm no expert.

And YET another black person!:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=548819

But this one is not so cheerfully accepted as being black!

Hypocrisy!

 

[classical_hero]

All Eastern Europeans look the same to me.

I thought Poles were from North Africa?

 

[JollyRoger]

That's North Poles.

 

[Domen]

North Poles are from the North Pole, South Poles from the South Pole, and Central Poles from the Equapol.

 

[JollyRoger]

North Poles are from the Eastern North Pole, South Poles from the Eastern South Pole, and Central Poles from the Eastern Equapol.

 

[Domen]

No matter where they are from. The city with the largest number of Poles is still Chicago. Warsaw comes 2nd.

 

[warpus]

Wikipedia says that Chicago has as many as 1.5 million people claiming to have Polish ancestry.

Warsaw has a population of 1.7 in the city alone, 2.66 million in the metro area. I realize that Warsaw is historically known as a diverse city, but I don't think there are more than 200,000 non-Poles living there. (But maybe I'm wrong?)

 

[Domen]

OK - so during the last few decades, Warsaw has finally surpassed Chicago, becoming the most Polish city (Chicago down to 2nd place).

but I don't think there are more than 200,000 non-Poles living there.

There might be 200,000 non-Poles there, actually. Anyway - Warsaw's population has been growing fast in last decades, due to immigration of people from other regions of Poland and from abroad to Warsaw. While Chicago's Polish population is not growing that fast (no new immigration from Poland).

I thought Poles were from North Africa?

Really - they were from areas much closer to the North Pole.

7500 years before present they (perhaps? or someone similar? ) made a stop in Karelia (just see the map below).

6000 years ago they (or someone similar?) made a stop near the Russian-Belarusian border.

4300 years ago they (?) were already in Poland, but they spoke some weird extinct language.

Germans (?) were also in Germany at that time, and they also spoke a Non-German language.

ybp = years before present

http://s8.postimg.org/67u7kqtb9/R1_samples_C.png

Vast majority of samples of ancient DNA included in the map above can be found here:

http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/ancientdna.shtml

New samples (from "One Hundred and One Bronze Age Eurasians", June 2015, by Allentoft et al.) can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9vzsK0Ig1mNeml0YnU1WDhXNWM/view

http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?4664-Request-Y-DNA-haplogroup-results-from-Allentoft-2015

And here is the original paper (it is under paywall - only supplementary info is free, but there you can find samples):

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/full/nature14507.html

 

[Domen]

Also "Supplementary Figure 2" from this "101 Bronze Age Eurasians" publication - the figure which compares autosomal DNA (entire genome) of said 101 BA people to modern people - shows that Bronze Age Scandinavians were most similar to modern Czechs; while Bronze Age "Poles, Czechs and Germans" were most similar to modern Croatians, Bulgarians, Hungarians and Czechs; Bronze Age "Hungarians" were most similar to modern French people; etc., etc.

Unfortunately the authors did not include modern Germans and Poles in the comparison (even though many "Bronze Agers" were from these areas).

They also did not bother to include modern Scandinavians*, which is maybe why modern Czechs show up as the most similar group to Bronze Age Scandinavians (because nobody bothered to include Norwegians, Danes and Swedes - who would probably be more similar).

*They included Orcadians, but these plot genetically farther away from Bronze Age Scandinavian samples - not as close as Czechs.

=================================

Link to Supplementary Info (PDF) - the figure which compares BA populations to some of modern populations is on page 33:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/extref/nature14507-s1.pdf

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/full/nature14507.html#supplementary-information

 

[Kyriakos]

North Poles are from the North Pole, South Poles from the South Pole, and Central Poles from the Equapol.

And they are all kept in the Pol-pot.

 

[Domen]

There are two kinds of Poles: Russians pretending to be German and Germans pretending to be Russian. No surprises there.

First graph below shows that Poles (PL) are closer to Russians than to West Germans (DE). However, Sorbs (SB) of East Germany are so close to Poles, that they actually look like a subgroup of Poles (2nd graph), and are also closer to Poles than to Czechs (CZ):

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2011/05/german-sorbs-genetically-closer-to.html

http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/veeramahlab/pubs/Veeramah_et_al_2011_EJHG.pdf

Second graph (Lusatian Sorbs - SB - are genetically fully within the range for Poles, so they look like a sub-group of Poles):

However, DE samples from this study are mostly from western Germany.

Eastern Germans are closer to Sorbs, Poles, and Czechs than western ones:

(...) One caution regarding our results is that the geographical origins of our reference populations are crudely characterized only by country and thus may not be random samples. If many of the Germans in the POPRES data are western German samples, this may inflate the apparent differences we observe between Germans and Sorbs. The LPZ Germans contained two individuals from Eastern Germany who do appear closer to the Sorbs, suggesting that population structure within countries is a valid concern. (...)

=============================

Another comparison (here they used samples from North-Eastern Germany, when it comes to Germans):

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058552

 

[gangleri2001]

So you basically opened a thread to tell us that you have a lot of free time.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I had no idea this thread would be so much fun, so I ignored it until now.

Let me give it a shot:

Pole.

German.

 

[Domen]

I had no idea this thread would be so much fun, so I ignored it until now.

Let me give it a shot:

Pole.

German.

^ Pole is smiling and slightly more beautiful.

Is that the difference ???