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The Amish are completely isolated from the average American gene pool due to their beliefs, they won’t have children with anyone who isn’t Amish (sometimes even anyone who isn’t in their particular Amish group). They speak their own language, have their own schools, church districts, towns, the only time they interact with outsiders is for business. A group of 500 arrived in the U.S in the 1700s from The Palatinate, Germany. Another group of 1500 arrived in the mid 19th century, mostly from the Palatinate and Alsace but also a few from Switzerland. Today there are over 350,000 of them living in the U.S, mostly Germans from the Palatinate, about 25,000 of them are decedents from the group in Switzerland. I realized that as I looked through a few of these photos some of the Amish seemed to look pretty peculiar, as if they had their own “look” about them. What do you think? Do you think that after hundreds of years of isolation these Amish have started to develop their own phenotype?
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