Mtebid Phenotype - Face Features & Origin

Average Face

What you see below is a statistical construction of the Mtebid reference population. Faces recorded from the Mtebid sample were overlaid and merged; the result keeps the features most members shared and discards personal variation. It reads like a Mtebid portrait, but it works like a histogram.

Composite source: Human Phenotypes — Mtebid

Geographic Distribution

The reference center for Mtebid sits near 42.5° N, 45.0° E in Caucasus. Around that anchor, prevalence falls off gradually — the type is not confined to one valley or one modern border, and the historical map should be read as a gradient rather than a boundary.

Physical Characteristics

Light brown skin, straight or wavy, usually brown hair.

• Medium height, mesoskelic- brachyskelic, endomorph to mesomorph
• Brachycephalic, hypsicranic
• Face broad, nose straight to convex and hyperleptorrhine
• In fact, Mtebids have the lowest nasal index of the whole region
• Body hair medium to strong, lips not very full
• Often similar to Alpinid, but facial features are usually more refined and the skull is longer and lower

Historical Background

Regional type of the Caucasus Mountains. Probably an Alpinised Dinaro-Armenid adapted to life in mountainous regions. Mtebids are typical of the Georgian population and common among Chechens, Ingushes, and Ossetians.

Research History & Naming

Every label in the historical catalogue has an author and a date, and Mtebid has accumulated its share of competing attributions. For Mtebid, the literature extract below shows the naming chain — from the first definition through the later revisions that shaped the current entry.

Named after the Georgian word for mountain (mtebi) by Lundman (1967) , who regarded it a Taurid with less marked features. Biasutti (1967) used the name "Georgiana" grouped it together with Alpinoids of Europe, Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1921) as Georgianus with Pamirids. Drexel's (1955) and Bunak's (1960) Caucasid are similar.

Comparison With Nearby Phenotypes

The five phenotypes whose documented centers lie closest to Mtebid, ranked by great-circle distance. They are the types players most often confuse with Mtebid in the quiz, precisely because their distributions overlap.

Mtebid in the Game

Mtebid is one of the faces that can appear in Classic Daily and Challenge Mode. When it does, the winning pin lands near 42.5° N, 45.0° E in Caucasus — and because the scoring decays with distance, recognizing the region matters more than pixel-perfect placement.

Mtebid Phenotype FAQ

Where does the Mtebid phenotype come from?

Historical sources center the Mtebid phenotype on 42.5° N, 45.0° E (Caucasus). Treat that as a rough anchor: the type appeared across a wider surrounding area — its nearest documented neighbors, East Alpinid and Armenid, sit 310 and 368 km from the reference point — and its present-day distribution no longer matches the historical map.

What does the Mtebid phenotype look like?

The composite emphasizes recurring traits: light brown skin, straight or wavy, usually brown hair. The full trait list for Mtebid appears in the physical characteristics section above.

Is the Mtebid phenotype a race or a nationality?

No — and the Mtebid naming history above shows why. Mtebid was defined, renamed, and regrouped repeatedly by different researchers, which is the opposite of how a fixed racial category would behave. A phenotype is a recurring bundle of visible traits recorded across a population; the Mtebid label says nothing about where any individual's ancestors were born.

How does Mtebid appear in the game?

When the Mtebid face comes up in Classic Daily or Challenge Mode, you pin the world map where you believe the type is historically most common, and the score decays with your distance to 42.5° N, 45.0° E. Fair warning: the nearest other entry in our dataset, East Alpinid, sits just 310 km away, so this face rewards precise placement — the right country alone is not always enough.

References & Literature

Primary sources for the Mtebid entry, listed as cited in the historical literature. The naming and classification debates around Mtebid referenced above run through these works.

• Lundman, B. 1967. Geographische Anthropologie. Rassen und Völker der Erde. G. Fischer, Stuttgart
• Biasutti, R. 1967 (1941). Le Razze e i Popoli della terra. 4th Ed. Vol 1-4. U.T.E.T., Torino.
• Giuffrida-Ruggeri, V. 1921. The first outlines of a Systematic Anthropology of Asia. Calcutta University Press.
• Drexel, A. 1955. Die Völker der Erde. 2nd Ed. Akademie Verlag. Zürich.
• Bunak, V.V. 1960. Anthropological Composition of the Population of the Caucasus. Contributions to the Physical Anlhropology of the Soviet Union. Russian Translation Series.

Related Phenotypes

More entries from the same region of the historical map as Mtebid, each with its own composite and trait profile.

• East Alpinid

  Middle East · 310 km away

  West Asian type that is anthropometrically and morphologically very similar to European Alpinids. Most common in the mountain zones of Anato...

• Armenid

  Caucasus · 368 km away

  Widespread type, found in its most specialised form in the mountains of Asia Minor. Associated with the ancient Cypriots and the Hittite Kin...

• Assyroid

  Middle East · 1,020 km away

  Semitic type that unites Armenoid with Arabid features. Historically important in the ancient Hittite Kingdom and the Assyrian civilisation....

• Anatolid

  Middle East · 1,054 km away

  Armenid subtype of Anatolia with Dinaroid features. The core population lives in West Anatolia. Probably the result of Armenid influx into a...

• Andronovo-Turanid

  Central Asia · 1,249 km away

  Northern Turanid variant, has probably been more widespread prior to the Tungid expansion of Hunnic, Avar, and Chasar tribes. Influenced by ...

Further Reading

Background articles from the blog that explain where the Mtebid type fits, how these composites are built, and what a face can and cannot tell you.

• Ethnicity Guesser vs Ethnoguessr: What Each One Counts

  Two products answer to nearly the same name in a search box, and the totals they advertise count two kinds of object that do not...

• AI Ethnicity Analyzer: Four Instruments, One Name

  An analyzer implies parts, but four quite different machines trade under that name: a label classifier, a geometry tool, an embedding...