Caucasoid
Caucasoid is a racial classification usually used as part of a system also including Australoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and sometimes others such as Capoid.
Geographic scope
Physical anthropology defines Caucasoid with a pattern of physical traits typical of humans indigenous to an area centered on Europe, the Mediterranean, West Asia and South Asia. Populations near the edge of this area in North Africa show features transitional between Caucasoid and Negroid, while much of Central Asia shows features transitional between Caucasoid and Mongoloid. Occasionally populations in distant areas, such as the Ainu, have been said to have some Caucasoid physical traits, but in overall genetics they have been found to resemble their immediate neighbors.
Semantic scope
The term Caucasoid is most used in discussions of human prehistory and in the forensic analysis of human remains. The suffix -oid indicates "a similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else", so Caucasoid can be expected to refer to a wider range of people than Caucasian, itself a term with an inexact definition.
Caucasoid does not apply to contemporary or historic definitions of racial or social groups; please see Whites and Caucasian race for those. Use of Caucasoid in these contexts may be seen as assertion of an essentialist viewpoint that contemporary or historic racial differences are biologically determined, or may simply be an imprecise attempt to use a more scientific-sounding synonym for Caucasian.
Racial classification and even the existence of race is controversial. Please see Race, Validity of human races, Race (historical definitions), Scientific racism, and Afrocentrism for discussion of these subjects. Designation of particular human groups as fully, partly, or not Caucasoid can also be politically loaded; for example, Afrocentrists may see definitions of Caucasoid that extend into Africa and South Asia as attempts to claim ancient civilizations thought to be prestigious such as Ancient Egypt as White instead of Black.
Skeletal and genetic traits
Caucasoids present the lowest degree of projection of the alveolar bones which contain the teeth, a notable size prominence of the cranium and forehead region, and a projection of the midfacial region; these show some similarity to certain Neanderthal traits, though the currently dominant single-origin hypothesis excludes any Neanderthal descent for modern humans, as opposed to the multiregional hypothesis which posits some regional continuity with earlier humans.
Some studies of genetic similarity find Caucasoids to be part of a Eurasian Supercluster that includes Eastern Eurasians, Pacific Islanders and the peoples of the Americas and Greenland. Other studies place Mongoloids as closer to the Australoids; then these two next cluster with Caucasoids before joining Negroids. The first principal component of variation in Cavalli-Sforza's analysis of multiple genes including blood groups and HLA antigens, find Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans to be at one pole with indigenous Australians at the other pole, and other peoples intermediate. Some of these genetic patterns may be due to natural selection for disease resistance, rather than indicative of origin.
Attempting to infer the origin and history of Caucasoids from genetic or other evidence is problematic as the picture continues to change with new evidence and ways of interpreting the data. Most recently, it has been suggested that European and West Asian mtDNA lineages with distant roots in South Asia indicate migration from South Asia to Central and West Asia and Europe 20-30 thousand years ago. These South Asian ancestors would in turn be descended (along with Mongoloids) from an earlier migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa 50-70 thousand years ago (Out-of-Africa model), which either gave rise to all non-Africans, or was the second and more northern of two major migrations.
Carleton S. Coon's book "The Races of Europe" classified Caucasoids into subraces named after regions or archeological sites such as Brünn, Borreby, Alpine, Ladogan, East Baltic, Neo-Danubian, Lappish, Mediterranean, Atlanto-Mediterranean, East African, Irano-Afghan, Nordic, Hallstatt, Keltic, Tronder, Dinaric, Noric and Armenoid. This extremely typological view of race was, even at the time of publication in 1939, becoming seen as very much out of date among anthropologists.
See also
- Caucasian race
- Negroid
- Mongoloid
- Australoid
- Capoid
- Race (historical definitions)
- Extra-European Caucasoid
External links
- Caucasoid Subraces Classification by Carleton S. Coon.