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The central concern of this paper is to illustrate how four apparently unrelated classes of variables — dental, perceptual, ethnic origin, and other — can be comprehended within a single parsimonious space, even though some of the measures were qualitative, others quantitative. Thirty‐five hundred Israeli villagers of varied ethnic origin were examined on several aspects of oral epidemiology, a battery of tests relating to estimation of number, and miscellaneous traits, including eye colour, tasting PTC, tongue rolling, etc. Significant differences between the six Jewish groups — Yemen, Cochin, Kurdistan, Libya, Berber, and Djerba — were found in the scores of most variables.By the use of the Smallest Space Analysis, distances were established between the different ethnic groups which took into account the complex interrelations in each of 3,500 individual subjects of all 45 categories of 16 variables. A three‐dimensional model of the interrelations between the ethnic groups and the trait categories was constructed from the 45 sets of coordinates which resulted from the iterative computer procedure. The ethnic group pairs at greatest distance from each other were found to be Kurdistan:Cochin, then Kurdistan:Djerba, followed by Djerba:Yemen.It is suggested that multivariate analyses of the type presented here, and including interrelations between genetic markers, anthropometric and behavioral variables, would deepen our understanding of the present structure and possible backgrounds of populations of diverse origins.

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