In 20 Years, 'the Most Typical Face' Will Be an Indian Face

If you averaged out all seven billion humans into a single face, whose would it be? National Geographic took that question literally in its 2011 "Population 7 Billion" series -- and the answer was a 28-year-old Han Chinese man. There were about 9 million people fitting that exact description, making him the statistical mode of humanity. The magazine even built a composite portrait from nearly 200,000 photographs of men who matched.

The demographics behind the answer were straightforward: China was the world's most populous country, Han Chinese its dominant ethnicity, and 28 sat near the median age of the global population.

But the series came with a forecast. Within 20 years, National Geographic projected, the most typical person on earth would be Indian. The logic was demographic arithmetic: China's population was aging and its growth slowing under the one-child policy, while India's younger, faster-growing population was on track to make it the world's most populous nation -- a crossover the United Nations later confirmed happened in 2023.

The "typical face" was always a thought experiment more than a science -- a vivid way to make abstract population statistics feel human. But as a snapshot of a hinge moment in demographics, it holds up: the face of the average human really is shifting south and west, just as the projection said.