Modern Greeks resemblance to Ancient Greeks has often been either challenged or accepted as fact. The truth is that genes recombine with every passing generation to combine unique generations. Not only do “no two people look alike” but generations also are unique. It would be reasonable to assume, however that if two populations are genetically similar then they would have evidence of genetic similarities.
In an effort to test the lineage of ancient and modern Greeks, Dienekes Pontikos, created genetic combinations with the averaged faces of 16 modern Greeks (football players from the 2002-2003 Champions League) and of 16 ancient Greeks (from marble sculptures). Using a software morphing package, known as Morpher, he created pair-wise averaging into single composite portraits.
The results:
To further test the similarity between the two he aligned the portraits:
When aligning the two sides of the portraits, he found a near-perfect geometrical alignment between modern Greek faces and those of their ancient Greek forefathers.
