Is there a way to determine ancestral decent based on facial features?

Question

Is there a way to determine ancestral decent based on facial features?

Answer 1

Nope.  Too many varibles.

Answer 2

No.

Answer 3

It is possible to construct certain distinguishing characteristics between you and your relatives, i.e. the distances between your eyes, bottom lip and chin, top lip and nose, etc., but it's not exactly accurate and realistically is only good as far back as you have photographs for. And honestly, you need to be specially trained to do something like this.. you can't simply take out a ruler and expect to determine relation.

Answer 4

possibly by the three basic humanoid classifications but not what last names would have been. might even find home land

Answer 5

There is a way to attempt to determine ancestral descent based on facial features that forensic anthropologists use, but it's not always successful.  There are so many countries where people of all different kinds of ancestries are starting to blend together and features are changing.  Sometimes the determination can be successful, but most of the time it's just a guess based on percentages.  The program FORDISC was created to try and determine ancestry using measurements from the cranium and it gives you a percentage, which can sometimes be accurate and sometimes not so accurate.  

Basically, yes there is a way to determine ancestry but depending on the individual, it's not always successful.

Answer 6

No.  A trained forensic artist (or a computer program written by one) can make an educated guess of a general category, possibly as specific as an ethnicity for those which have a distinctive feature or common abnormality, but have you ever tried to look at a mixed breed dog and figure out what breeds it is?  When it's two or three breeds, it can be done becuase there isn't a lot of variation within a breed but consider how much variation there is between human faces even within a bounded society.  Then consider that you might have grandparents each from a different ethnic group, or great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents, etc.  The combinations are insanely complicated.