Pheno Guesser

A physical-anthropology guessing game, for learning the world's phenotypes and where they are found.

Each round shows the male and female composites of one anthropological type. Place a guess on the map and confirm. A guess inside the type's common range scores the full 5000; outside it the score falls off logarithmically with the distance to the nearest edge of that range, reaching zero at 5000 km. A guess inside the wider, occasional range is guaranteed a partial score. Main mode draws from the 200-odd local varieties, Basic mode from the 38 basic types they belong to, and Regional mode from the varieties of one macro-region. Play is unlimited; scores and streaks are kept per mode in your browser.

Sources and attribution

The types, composite portraits, descriptions, physical traits, literature notes and range maps all come from Human Phenotypes, a private, unfunded project by an anonymous author that was published at humanphenotypes.com and later went offline. It compiled the typological literature of 20th-century physical anthropology into 38 basic types and over 200 local varieties, with maps and descriptions referring to the pre-colonial world of around 1500 CE. That author is the creator of everything shown on the answer panels here.

The material was drawn from humanphenotypes.net, a preservation copy made by a third party after the original site shut down, which states it is not the creator and has had no contact with them. The original author could not be reached; this is an orphan work used in good faith for a non-commercial educational purpose. The range polygons used for scoring were traced from the original maps and reprojected; the base map is Natural Earth, public domain.