The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, Europid, or Europoid) is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from Europe, West Asia, North Africa and some parts of South Asia, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.
Introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, the term denoted one of three purported major races of humans (those three being Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid). In biological anthropology, Caucasoid has been used as an umbrella term for phenotypically similar groups from these different regions, with a focus on skeletal anatomy, and especially cranial morphology, without regard to skin tone. Ancient and modern "Caucasoid" populations were thus not exclusively "white", but ranged in complexion from white-skinned to dark brown.
Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists have switched from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective, and have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences.
In the United States, the root term Caucasian is still in use as a synonym for people considered "white" or of European, West Asian, or North African ancestry as defined by the United States census. Currently, its continued usage as a racial descriptor has been criticized. The term also sees usage in other English-speaking countries like Australia.
History of the concept Caucasus as the origin of humanity and the peak of beauty In the eighteenth century, the prevalent view among European scholars was that the human species had its origin in the region of the Caucasus Mountains. This view was based upon the Caucasus being the location for the purported landing point of Noah's Ark – from whom the Bible states that humanity is descended – and the location for the suffering of Prometheus, who in Hesiod's myth had crafted humankind from clay.
In addition, the most beautiful humans were reputed by Europeans to be the stereotypical "Circassian beauties" and the Georgians; both Georgia and Circassia are in the Caucasus region. The "Circassian beauty" stereotype had its roots in the Middle Ages, while the reputation for the attractiveness of the Georgian people was developed by early modern travellers to the region such as Jean Chardin.Chardin, 1686, Journal du voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales par la Mer Noire et par la Colchide, p.204, "Le sang de Géorgie est le plus beau d'Orient, et je puis dire du monde, je n'ai pas remarqué un laid visage en ce païs la, parmi l'un et l'autre sexe: mais j'y en ay vû d'Angeliques."
Göttingen school of history
The term Caucasian as a racial category was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history — notably Christoph Meiners in 1785 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795. It had originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.For example, such as in the Allgemeine Erdbeschreibung published by Meyer in 1777:
In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasisch) race in its wider racial sense. As a supporter of the polygenist theory of human origins, he subscribed to a "binary [greater] racial scheme" of superior Caucasians and inferior Mongoloids in which he did not include Jews as Caucasians and to whom he ascribed a "permanently degenerate nature".Eigen, Sara. The German Invention of Race. Suny Press:New York, 2006. p.205 Using a "bundle of notions" led to creations of purported subraces on a continental and state basis with implied decreased respective scientific weight. Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by many people. Other members of the Göttingen school of history would make the addition of Negroids.
It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a colleague of Meiners', who later came to be considered one of the founders of the discipline of anthropology, who gave the term a wider audience, by grounding it in the new methods of craniometry and Linnean taxonomy. Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus origins.: "The connection between Meiners's ideas about a Caucasian branch of humanity and Blumenbach's later conception of a Caucasian variety (eventually, a Caucasian race) is not completely clear. What is clear is that the two editions of Meiners's Outline were published between the second edition of Blumenbach's On the Natural Variety of Mankind and the third edition, where Blumenbach first used the term Caucasian. Blumenbach cited Meiners once in 1795, but only to include Meiners's 1793 division of humanity into "handsome and white" and "ugly and dark" peoples among several alternative "divisions of the varieties of mankind." Yet Blumenbach must have been aware of Meiners's earlier designation of Caucasian and Mongolian branches of humanity, as the two men knew each other as colleagues at the University of Göttingen. The way that Blumenbach embraced the term Caucasian suggests that he worked to distance his own anthropological thinking from that of Meiners while recovering the term Caucasian for his own more refined racial classification: he made no mention of Meiners's 1785 usage and gave the term a new meaning. In contrast to Meiners, however, Blumenbach was a monogenist—he considered all humans to have a shared origin and to be a single species. Blumenbach, like Meiners, did rank his Caucasian grouping higher than other groups in terms of mental faculties or potential for achievement despite pointing out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary".German: "sehr willkürlich": Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology in addition to skin pigmentation.On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795) in Bendyshe: 264–65; "racial face," 229. He ultimately imagined that the Caucasian race encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches. This usage later grew into the widely used color terminology for race, contrasting with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid.
Carleton Coon There was never consensus among the proponents of the "Caucasoid race" concept regarding how it would be delineated from other groups such as the proposed Mongoloid race. Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia, including the Ainu people, under the Caucasoid label. Many scientists maintained the racial categorizations of color established by Meiners' and Blumenbach's works, along with many other early steps of anthropology, well into the 20th century as they were increasingly used to justify political policies such as segregation and immigration restrictions. For example, Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified all populations of Asian nations as Mongoloid. Lothrop Stoddard (1920) in turn classified as "brown" most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and South Asia. He counted as "white" only European peoples and their descendants, as well as a few populations in areas adjacent to or opposite southern Europe, in parts of Anatolia and parts of the Rif and Atlas mountains.
In 1939, Coon claimed that the Caucasian race had originated through admixture between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens of the "Mediterranean type" which he considered to be distinct from Caucasians, rather than a subtype of it as others had done. While Blumenbach had erroneously thought that light skin color was ancestral to all humans and the dark skin of southern populations was due to sun, Coon thought that Caucasians had lost their original pigmentation as they moved North. Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously.The Races of Europe, Chapter XIII, Section 2
In 1962, Coon published The Origin of Races, wherein he proposed a polygenist view, that human races had evolved separately from local varieties of Homo erectus. He divided humans into five main races and claimed that each evolved in parallel but at different rates, so that some races had reached higher levels of evolution than others. He claimed that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the "Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.
Coon also claimed that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnons, and were present in the Skhul and Qafzeh hominins.The Origin of Races. Random House Inc., 1962, p. 570. However, these fossils and the Predmost specimen were held to be Neanderthaloid derivatives because they possessed short cervical vertebrae, lower and narrower pelves, and had some Neanderthal skull traits. Coon further asserted that the Caucasoid race was of dual origin, consisting of early dolichocephalic (e.g. Galley Hill, Combe-Capelle, Téviec) and Neolithic Mediterranean Homo sapiens (e.g. Muge, Long Barrow, Corded), as well as Neanderthal-influenced brachycephalic Homo sapiens dating to the Mesolithic and Neolithic (e.g. Afalou, Hvellinge, Fjelkinge).
Coon's theories on race were much disputed in his lifetime, and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.
Disproof by modern genetics The fact that there are no sharp distinctions between the supposed racial groups had been observed by Blumenbach and later by Charles Darwin."It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant... they graduate into each other, and.. it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them... As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who had these same characters.", Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man p. 225 onwards
With the availability of new data due to the development of modern genetics, the concept of races in a biological sense has become untenable. Problems of the concept include: It "is not useful or necessary in research", scientists are not able to agree on the definition of a certain proposed race, and they do not even agree on the number of races, with some proponents of the concept suggesting 300 or even more "races". Also, data are not reconcilable with the concept of a treelike evolution"Indeed, if a species has sufficient gene flow, there can be no evolutionary tree of populations, because there are no population splits...", Templeton, A. (2016). Evolution and Notions of Human Race. In Losos J. & Lenski R. (Eds.), How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society (p. 355). Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. . nor with the concept of "biologically discrete, isolated, or static" populations. The organization has since been renamed the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.
Current scientific consensus