Jump to content

Caucasian race

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by TheGracefulSlick (talk | contribs) at 17:17, 13 January 2019 (Reverted 1 pending edit by 108.41.97.165 to revision 878195036 by Neiltonks: I am cautious to accept this without a new (reliable) source to counter the prior version). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains, see Peoples of the Caucasus. For other uses of the term "Caucasian", see Caucasian (disambiguation).

A Caucasoid female skull from the National Museum of Health and Medicine

The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid[1] or Europid)[2] is a grouping of human beings historically regarded as a biological taxon, which, depending on which of the historical race classifications used, has usually included some or all of the ancient and modern populations of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[3]

First introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History,[4] the term denoted one of three purported major races of humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid).[5] 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, over skin tone.[6] Ancient and modern "Caucasoid" populations were thus held to have ranged in complexion from very light to very dark, and included populations ranging from Europeans, to Indians, to Gulf Arabs, to Somalis.[7]

Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists have moved away 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.[8] Although Caucasian / Caucasoid and their counterparts Negroid and Mongoloid have been used less frequently as a biological classification in forensic anthropology (where it is sometimes used as a way to identify the ancestry of human remains based on interpretations of osteological measurements), the terms remain in use by some anthropologists.[9]

In the United States, the root term Caucasian has also often been used in a different, societal context as a synonym for "white" or "of European ancestry".[10][11] Its usage in American English has been criticized.[12]

Etymology

The traditional anthropological term Caucasoid is a conflation of the demonym Caucasian and the Greek suffix eidos (meaning "form", "shape", "resemblance"), implying a resemblance to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus. In its usage as a racial category, it contrasts with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid.[13]

History of the concept

Christoph Meiners

Christoph Meiners' 1785 treatise The Outline of History of Mankind was the first work to use the term Caucasian (Kaukasischen) in its wider racial sense.

The term Caucasian originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.[14] In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasischen) race in its wider racial sense.[4][15][16]

Meiners acknowledged two races: the Caucasian or beautiful, and the Mongolian or ugly. His 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.[17]

In his earlier racial typology, Meiners put forth that Caucasians had the "whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin".[18] In a series of articles, Meiners boasts about the superiority of Germans among Europeans, and describes non-German Europeans' color as "dirty whites", in an unfavorable comparison with Germans.[19] Such views were typical of early proto-scientific attempts at racial classification, where skin pigmentation was regarded as the main difference between races. [citation needed] This view was shared by the French naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey, who believed that the Caucasians were only the palest-skinned Europeans.[20]

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Drawing of the skull of a Georgian female by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, used as an archetype for the Caucasian racial characteristics in his 1795 De Generis Humani Varietate

It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine and a member of the British Royal Society, and who 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.[21]

Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus origins:[22]

Caucasian variety – I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (original members) of mankind.[23]

Blumenbach would later assert that of the various Caucasian varieties, the Northern European type (encompassing the present-day United Kingdom, France and Scandinavia) represented the perfect form.[24]

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.[21]

1851 map of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's five races

In various editions of On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach expanded on Meiners' popular idea and defined five human races based on color, using popular racial terms of his day, justified with scientific terminology, cranial measurements, and facial features. He established Caucasian as the "white race", Mongoloid as the "yellow race", Malayan as the "brown race", Ethiopian as the "black race", and American as the "red race".[25] In the 3rd edition of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach moved skin tone to second-tier importance after noticing that poorer European people (such as peasants) whom he observed generally worked outside, often became darker skinned ("browner") through sun exposure.[26] He also noticed that darker skin of an "olive-tinge" was a natural feature of some European populations closer to the Mediterranean Sea.[27] Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology in addition to skin pigmentation, and thus considered more than just the palest Europeans ("white, cheeks rosy") as archetypes for the Caucasian race.[28]

Following Meiners, Blumenbach described the Caucasian race as consisting of the native inhabitants of Europe, West Asia, the Indian peninsula, and North Africa, including toward the south the Moors, Abyssinians and adjacent groups. His idealized Caucasian variety was distinguished by a white complexion, with rosy cheeks; brown or chestnut-colored hair; a subglobular head; an oval and straight face, with moderately defined parts; a smooth forehead; a narrow nose, often slightly hooked; and a small mouth. However, pragmatically, Blumenbach acknowledged that skin color of the Caucasian variety naturally ranged from white to dark brown tones.[7]

Carleton Coon

Further information: White people and Brown people
Distribution of the races after the Pleistocene according to Carleton Coon
  Caucasoid race
  Negroid race
  Capoid race
  Mongoloid race
  Australoid race

There was never any consensus among the proponents of the concept the existence of a "Caucasoid race" with regard to how it would be delineated from other proposed groups such as the proposed Mongoloid race. Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasoid label. However, 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 late 19th and mid-to-late 20th centuries, increasingly used to justify political policies, such as segregation and immigration restrictions, and other opinions based in prejudice. 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 argued 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.[29] 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.[29] Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously.[30]

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. Dividing humans into five main races, and argued that each evolved in parallel but at different rates, so that some races had reached higher levels of evolution than others.[8] He argued that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the "Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.[31]

Racial anthropology

Armenian man, Armenoid type
Armenian man of Armenoid type
Irish man, Mediterranean type
Irish man of Mediterranean type
Bisharin man, Hamitic type
Bisharin man of Hamitic type
Afghan man, Iranid type
Afghan man of Iranid type
Danish man, Nordic type
Danish man of Nordic type
Tajik man, Alpine type
Tajik man of Alpine type
Hindu man, Aryan type
Hindu man of Aryan type
Catalan man, Iberian type
Catalan man of Iberian type
Traditional Caucasoid subraces

Physical traits

Skin

The dermis is thinner in whites than in other races; the exposed skin is vulnerable to sunburn because of the lower amount of melanin in the skin than in other races.[32] These traits cause problems in warm climates, but the nearly transparent skin allows more sunlight to reach the inner layers of the epidermis, thereby increasing Vitamin D production far above the level found in other racial groups. A study of skin cultured from the hip region of Europeans and Africans living in Nigeria showed that European skins allow penetration of between 3 and 4 times as much UV radiation incident upon the skin.[33]

Skull and teeth

Drawing from Petrus Camper's theory of facial angle, Blumenbach and Cuvier classified races, through their skull collections based on their cranial features and anthropometric measurements. Caucasoid traits were recognised as: thin nasal aperture ("nose narrow"), a small mouth, facial angle of 100°–90°, and orthognathism, exemplified by what Blumenbach saw in most ancient Greek crania and statues.[34][35] Later anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th century such as Pritchard, Pickering, Broca, Topinard, Morton, Peschel, Seligman, Bean, Ripley, Haddon and Dixon came to recognize other Caucasoid morphological features, such as prominent supraorbital ridges and a sharp nasal sill.[36] Many anthropologists in the 20th century used the term "Caucasoid" in their literature, such as Boyd, Gates, Coon, Cole, Brues and Krantz replacing the earlier term "Caucasian" as it had fallen out of usage.[37]

Caucasoids (including Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples) have small teeth, [38] with the maxillary lateral incisors often shrunken in size or replaced with peg laterals. According to George W. Gill and other modern forensic anthropologists, physical traits of Caucasoid crania can be distinguished from those of the people from Mongoloid and Negroid racial groups based on the shapes of specific diagnostic anatomical features. They assert that they can identify a Caucasoid skull with an accuracy of up to 95%.[39][40][41][42][43] However, Alan H. Goodman cautions that this precision estimate is often based on methodologies using subsets of samples. He also argues that scientists have a professional and ethical duty to avoid such biological analyses since they could potentially have sociopolitical effects.[44]

Variation in craniofacial form between humans has been found to be largely due to differing patterns of biological inheritance. Modern cross-analysis of osteological variables and genome-wide SNPs has identified specific genes, which control this craniofacial development. Of these genes, DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3, PAX1 and PAX3 were found to determine nasal morphology, whereas EDAR impacts chin protrusion and facial hair, both of which have been recently selected in Caucasians[45] [46]

Cold tolerance

The European mt-DNA Haplogroup J has been speculated to provide greater heat production upon exposure to cold than other haplogroups prevalent in the area.[47] The mitochondrial uncoupling mechanism sets the ratio of body heat produced per calorie of food consumed, with Haplogroup J thereby increasing metabolism and warming the body.

Classification

Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1885–1890) ethnographic map
Caucasoid:
  Aryans
  Semitic
  Hamitic

Negroid:
  African Negro
  Khoikhoi
  Melanesian
  Negrito
  Australoid

Uncertain:
  Dravida & Sinhalese
 Mongoloid:
  North Mongol
  Chinese & Indochinese
  Korean & Japanese
  Tibetan & Burmese
  Malay
  Polynesian
  Maori
  Micronesian
  Eskimo & Inuit
  American

In the 19th century Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1885–90), Caucasoid was one of the three great races of humankind, alongside Mongoloid and Negroid. The taxon was taken to consist of a number of subtypes. The Caucasoid peoples were usually divided into three groups on ethnolinguistic grounds, termed Aryan (Indo-European), Semitic (Semitic languages), and Hamitic (Hamitic languages i.e. Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian).[48]

19th century classifications of the peoples of India considered the Dravidians of non-Caucasoid stock as Australoid or a separate Dravida race, and assumed a gradient of miscegenation of high-caste Caucasoid Aryans and indigenous Dravidians. Carleton S. Coon in his 1939 book The Races of Europe, described the Veddoid race as "possess[ing] an obvious relationship with the aborigines of Australia, and possibly a less patent one with the Negritos" and as "the most important element in the Dravidian-speaking population of southern India".[49] In his later The Living Races of Man (1965), Coon considerably amended his views, acknowledging that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasoid racial region". However, he still recognized an Australoid substrate throughout the subcontinent, writing that "the earliest peoples who have left recognizable survivors were both Caucasoid and Australoid food gatherers. Some of the survivors are largely Caucasoid; others are largely Australoid."[50]

There was no universal consensus of the validity of the "Caucasoid" grouping within those who attempted to categorize human variation. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870 wrote that the "absurd denomination of 'Caucasian'" was in fact a conflation of his Xanthochroi and Melanochroi types.[51]

Historically, the racial classification of the Turkic peoples was sometimes given as "Turanid". Turanid racial type or "minor race", subtype of the Europid (Caucasian) race with Mongoloid admixtures, situated at the boundary of the distribution of the Mongoloid and Europid "great races".[52][53]

Subraces

The postulated subraces vary depending on the author, including but not limited to Mediterranean, Atlantid, Nordic, East Baltic, Alpine, Dinaric, Turanid, Armenoid, Iranid, Arabid, and Hamitic.[54]

H. G. Wells argued that across Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia, a Caucasian physical stock existed. He divided this racial element into two main groups: a shorter and darker Mediterranean or Iberian race and a taller and lighter Nordic race. Wells asserted that Semitic and Hamitic populations were mainly of Mediterranean type, and Aryan populations were originally of Nordic type. He regarded the Basques as descendants of early Mediterranean peoples, who inhabited western Europe before the arrival of Aryan Celts from the direction of central Europe.[55]

Origin

The original "Old man of Crô-Magnon", Musée de l'Homme, Paris
File:Homo neanderthalensis adult male - head model - Smithsonian Museum of Natural History - 2012-05-17.jpg
Reconstruction of the head of the Shanidar 1 fossil, a Neanderthal male who lived in Iraq c. 70,000 years ago

Among the earliest anatomically modern human settlements established in Europe were Kostenki-Borshchevo, Voronezh Oblast in southwestern Russia. DNA sequencing of a 37,000-year-old male skeleton from the area, Kostenki XIV or Markina Gora, indicates that these early settlers possessed a similar genetic makeup as modern Europeans, but had dark skin and dark eyes. They also possessed slightly more Neanderthal genes than modern populations in Europe and Asia due to interbreeding with Neanderthals over 45,000 years ago.[56] In a study of Cro-Magnon crania, Jantz and Owsley (2003) have noted that these "Upper Paleolithic crania are, for the most part, larger and more generalized versions of recent Europeans."[57]

William Howells (1997) has argued that Cro-Magnons were Caucasoid based on their cranial traits:

... the Cro-Magnons were already racially European, i.e., Caucasoid. This has always been accepted because of the general appearance of the skulls: straight faces, narrow noses, and so forth. It is also possible to test this arithmetically.... Except for Predmosti 4, which is distant from every present and past population, all of these skulls show themselves to be closer to "Europeans" than to other peoples – Mladec and Abri Pataud comfortably so, the other two much more remotely.[58]

Carleton Coon (1962) argued that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnons, and were present in the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids.[59] 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).[60]

More recent osteological analysis of Cro-Magnon fossils indicates that they had larger skulls than modern populations, and possessed a dolichocephalic (long-head) and low cranium, with a wide face. It also suggests that some Cro-Magnons may have had brown skin.[61] The very light skin tone found in modern Northern Europeans is a relatively recent phenomenon.[62] It may have appeared in the European line as recently as 6 to 12 thousand years ago, indicating that Cro-Magnons had brown skin.[63]

According to geneticist David Reich, based on ancient human genomes that his laboratory sequenced in 2016, ancient West Eurasians descend from a mixture of as few as four ancestral components related to the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG), the Neolithic Iran, the Neolithic Levant and Natufians, and the Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG):[64]

whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong... “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.[65]

Usage in the United States

Further information: Race in the United States

In the United States, the term "Caucasoid" is used in disciplines such as craniometry, epidemiology, forensic medicine, forensic anthropology, and forensic archaeology. It is also associated with notions of racial typology.

Besides its use in anthropology and related fields, the term "Caucasian" has often been used in the United States in a different, social context to describe a group commonly called "white people".[66] "White" also appears as a self-reporting entry in the U.S. Census.[67] Naturalization as a United States citizen was restricted to "free white persons" by the Naturalization Act of 1790, and later extended to other resident populations by the Naturalization Act of 1870, Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because, though deemed "Caucasian" anthropologically, they were not white like European descendants since most laypeople did not consider them to be "white" people. This represented a change from the Supreme Court's earlier opinion in Ozawa v. United States, in which it had expressly approved of two lower court cases holding "high caste Hindus" to be "free white persons" within the meaning of the naturalization act. Government lawyers later recognized that the Supreme Court had "withdrawn" this approval in Thind.[68] In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed a new law establishing a small immigration quota for Indians, which also permitted them to become citizens. Major changes to immigration law, however, only later came in 1965, when many earlier racial restrictions on immigration were lifted.[69] This resulted in confusion about whether American Hispanics are included as "white", as the term Hispanic originally applied to Spanish heritage but has since expanded to include all people with origins in Spanish speaking countries. In other countries, the term Hispanic is not nearly as associated with race, but with the Spanish language and cultural affiliation.

The United States National Library of Medicine often used the term "Caucasian" as a race in the past. However, it later discontinued such usage in favor of the more narrow geographical term European, which traditionally only applied to a subset of Caucasoids.[70]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ The traditional anthropological term Caucasoid is a conflation of the demonym Caucasian and the Greek suffix eidos (meaning "form", "shape", "resemblance"), implying a resemblance to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus. It etymologically contrasts with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid (Freedman, B. J. (1984). "For debate... Caucasian" (PDF). British Medical Journal. 288 (6418). Routledge: 696–98. doi:10.1136/bmj.288.6418.696. PMC 1444385. PMID 6421437. Retrieved March 27, 2017.) For a contrast with the "Mongolic" or Mongoloid race, see footnote #4 pp. 58–59 in Beckwith, Christopher. (2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13589-2. OCLC 800915872.
  2. ^ Pearson, Roger (1985). Anthropological glossary. R.E. Krieger Pub. Co. p. 79. Retrieved July 21, 2015.
  3. ^ Coon, Carleton Stevens (1939). The Races of Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company. pp. 400–01. This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across Afghanistan into India [...] The Mediterranean racial zone stretches unbroken from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence eastward to India[...] A branch of it extends far southward on both sides of the Red Sea into southern Arabia, the Ethiopian highlands, and the Horn of Africa.
  4. ^ a b
    • Baum 2006, pp. 84–85: "Finally, Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), the University of Göttingen “popular philosopher” and historian, first gave the term Caucasian racial meaning in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outline of the History of Humanity, 1785)… Meiners pursued this “Göttingen program” of inquiry in extensive historical-anthropological writings, which included two editions of his Outline of the History of Humanity and numerous articles in Göttingisches Historisches Magazin"
    • William R. Woodward (June 9, 2015). Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press. p. 260. ISBN 978-1-316-29785-8. ...the five human races identified by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – Negroes, American Indians, Malaysians, Mongolians, and Caucasians. He chose to rely on Blumenbach, leader of the Göttingen school of comparative anatomy; also at [1]
    • Nicolaas A. Rupke (2002). Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences. Wallstein-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89244-611-8. For it was at Gottingen in this period that the outlines of a system of classification were laid down in a manner that still shapes the way in which we attempt to comprehend the different varieties of humankind — including usage of such terms as "Caucasian".
    • Charles Simon-Aaron (2008). The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire, Enlightenment, and the Cult of the Unthinking Negro. Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-5197-1. Here, Blumenbach placed the white European at the apex of the human family; he even gave the European a new name — i.e., Caucasian. This relationship also inspired the academic labors of Karl Otfried Muller, C. Meiners and K.A. Heumann, the more important thinkers at Gottingen for our project. (This list is not intended to be exhaustive).
    • RACAR, Revue D'art Canadienne: Canadian Art Review. Society for the Promotion of Art History Publications in Canada. 2004. It is in the context of the shift to the human as both subject and object that Foucault has placed the "invention" of the human sciences, and it is also in this context that the various human histories as conceived and taught at Gottingen — from the theories of race proposed by Christoph Meiners and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (who would coin the word "Caucasian" in the 1790s) to new theories of history as interpreted by Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig von Schlozer to a new art history as conceived by Fiorillo — can be considered.
  5. ^ Pickering, Robert (2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. p. 82. ISBN 1-4200-6877-6.
  6. ^ Pickering, Robert (2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. p. 109. ISBN 1-4200-6877-6.
  7. ^ a b Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1865). Thomas Bendyshe (ed.). The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Anthropological Society. pp. 265, 303, 367.
  8. ^ a b Caspari, Rachel (2003). "From types to populations: A century of race, physical anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association" (PDF). American Anthropologist. 105 (1): 65–76. doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.65.
  9. ^ See these sources:
    • Ousley, S.; Jantz, R.; Freid, D. (2009). "Understanding race and human variation: why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 139 (1): 68–76. doi:10.1002/ajpa.21006. Although a shift in terminology has been underway in forensic anthropology, with ancestry used more often in place of race, in many case reports the classic physical anthropology terms such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid, or Negroid are still seen
    • Sue Black; Eilidh Ferguson (April 19, 2016). Forensic Anthropology: 2000 to 2010. CRC Press. pp. 126–127. ISBN 978-1-4398-4589-9. Semantically speaking, the term race appears to pertain to the individual and has largely been succeeded in physical anthropology by the more impersonal term ancestry. The distinction between these terms is considered to be important. Race may be regarded as a "socially constructed mechanism for self identification and group membership" and so biologically meaningless, whereas ancestry is a "scientifically derived descriptor of the biological component of population variation" (Konigsberg et al. 2009: 77–78). So, why do the rather politically sensitive terms Caucasoid, Mongoloid, or Negroid still appear in published literature (Ousley et al. 2009)? There are considered to be four basic ancestry groups into which an individual can be placed by physical appearance, not accounting for admixture: the sub-Saharan African group ("Negroid"), the European group ("Caucasoid"), the Central Asian group ("Mongoloid"), and the Australasian group ("Australoid"). The rather outdated names of all but one of these groups were originally derived from geography: The Caucasoid group traversed the Caucasus Mountains as they spread into Europe and eastern Asia. Since the majority of native peoples from the Indian subcontinent, northern and northeastern Africa and the Near East fall into this group, to say that the group is of "European" ancestry does not really suffice. Plus, the terms Caucasoid or Caucasian do not have the same oppressive, persecutory connotations as the other terms and so are less likely to cause offense.
    • Robert B. Pickering; David Bachman (January 22, 2009). The Use of Forensic Anthropology. CRC Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN 978-1-4200-6878-8. Race is both a cultural and a biological term. For more than a century, scientists and philosophers have tried to define race and describe races. Some scientists define only three races: caucasoid, mongoloid, and negroid, while other scientists have defined more than 10. In our current climate of multicultural sensitivity, some scholars, not forensic anthropologists, suggest that race does not exist, or at least it should not be talked about....From the forensic perspective, using the "three-race" model still has some value in describing broad genetic and morphological characteristics. This model is used by many people to describe themselves and others. Therefore, it falls to the forensic investigator to use the term defined by the model in trying to identify the dead. The model is not perfect, but it does help us understand some of the variation in shape and form on some parts of the skeleton, particularly the skull.
    • Pekka Saukko; Bernard Knight (November 4, 2015). Knight's Forensic Pathology Fourth Edition. CRC Press. p. 120. ISBN 978-1-4441-6508-1. There is no consensus as to whether forensic anthropologists or osteologists should include assesments of 'race' or ancestry in skeletal reports as according to Iscan and Steyn it seems to remain tentative at best.111 As of the osteological range present little difficulty, as Brothwell usual, those at the extreme ends remarks ... usual warnings about dogmatic opinions are even more important in this field.... There are three main racial groups: Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid.
  10. ^ Bhopal, R.; Donaldson, L. (1998). "White, European, Western, Caucasian, or what? Inappropriate labeling in research on race, ethnicity, and health". American Journal of Public Health. 88 (9): 1303–1307. doi:10.2105/ajph.88.9.1303. PMC 1509085.
  11. ^ Baum 2006, p. 3,18.
  12. ^ See for example:
    • Herbst, Philip (June 15, 1997). The color of words: an encyclopaedic dictionary of ethnic bias in the United States. Intercultural Press. ISBN 978-1-877864-97-1. Though discredited as an anthropological term and not recommended in most editorial guidelines, it is still heard and used, for example, as a category on forms asking for ethnic identification. It is also still used for police blotters (the abbreviated Cauc may be heard among police) and appears elsewhere as a euphemism. Its synonym, Caucasoid, also once used in anthropology but now dated and considered pejorative, is disappearing.
    • Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. (June 30, 2008). "Getting Rid of the Word "Caucasian"". In Mica Pollock (ed.). Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School. New Press. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-1-59558-567-7. Yet there is one striking exception in our modem racial vocabulary: the term "Caucasian." Despite being a remnant of a discredited theory of racial classification, the term has persisted into the twenty-first century, within as well as outside of the educational community. It is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian. Some might protest that it is "only a label." But language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting racial ideology. Terms that describe imagined groups, such as Caucasian, encapsulate those beliefs. Every time we use them and uncritically expose students to them, we are reinforcing rather than dismantling the old racialized worldview. Using the word Caucasian invokes scientific racism, the false idea that races are naturally occurring, biologically ranked subdivisions of the human species and that Caucasians are the superior race. Beyond this, the label Caucasian can even convey messages about which groups have culture and are entitled to recognition as Americans.
    • Dewanjuly, Shaila (July 6, 2013). "Has 'Caucasian' Lost Its Meaning?". New York Times. Retrieved March 16, 2018. AS a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries… Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as "Mongolian" or blacks as "Negroid."… There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)… The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations… In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been "practically discarded." But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach's authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your "vehicle" instead of your car…. Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears "Caucasian." "Most of the folks who work in this field know that it's a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites," she said. "I think it's a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that's going to make them be as distant from it as possible."
  13. ^ Freedman, B. J. (1984). "For debate... Caucasian" (PDF). British Medical Journal. 288 (6418). Routledge: 696–98. doi:10.1136/bmj.288.6418.696. PMC 1444385. PMID 6421437. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  14. ^ For example, such as in the Allgemeine Erdbeschreibung published by Meyer in 1777: Allgemeine Erdbeschreibung: Asien - Volume 3. Meyer. 1777. p. 1435.
  15. ^ Meiners, Christoph. Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit. Im Verlage der Meyerschen Buchhandlung. pp. 25–. Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by
  16. ^ See for example:
  17. ^ The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, Volume 4. Appleton. 1870. p. 588.
  18. ^ "Gender and Germanness: cultural productions of nation", Magda Mueller, Patricia Herminghouse, 1998, p. 28.
  19. ^ Painter, Nell (2010). The History of White People. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-393-04934-3.
  20. ^ Baum 2006, p. 98.
  21. ^ a b Bhopal R (December 2007). "The beautiful skull and Blumenbach's errors: the birth of the scientific concept of race". BMJ. 335 (7633): 1308–09. doi:10.1136/bmj.39413.463958.80. PMC 2151154. PMID 18156242.
  22. ^ Baum 2006, p. 88: "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.
  23. ^ Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa (3rd ed. 1795), trans. Bendyshe (1865). Quoted e.g. in Arthur Keith, '"Blumenbach's Centenary", Man (journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland), v. 40, pp. 82–85 (1940).
  24. ^ Mukhopadyay, C. "Getting Rid of the Word Caucasian" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  25. ^ RACE – History – Early Classification of Nature
  26. ^ On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795) in Bendyshe: 227, 214.
  27. ^ On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795) in Bendyshe: 209, 210.
  28. ^ On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795) in Bendyshe: 264–65; "racial face," 229.
  29. ^ a b The Races of Europe by Carleton Coon 1939 Archived February 25, 2005, at archive.today (Hosted by the Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology)
  30. ^ The Races of Europe, Chapter XIII, Section 2 Archived May 11, 2006, at archive.today
  31. ^ Jackson Jr, J. P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races". Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–85. doi:10.1023/a:1010366015968.
  32. ^ Goldman, M.P. et al. (2013). Lasers and Energy Devices for the Skin (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis Group. pp. 293. ISBN 978-1-84184-934-8
  33. ^ Thomson, M. L. (1951). "Relative Efficiency of Pigment and Horny Layer Thickness in Protecting the Skin of Europeans and Africans against Solar Ultraviolet Radiation". J. Physiol.: 236–246.
  34. ^ "Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper", 1722–1789, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 169–74.
  35. ^ Bertoletti, Stefano Fabbri. 1994. The anthropological theory of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In Romanticism in science, science in Europe, 1790–1840.
  36. ^ See individual literature for such Caucasoid identifications, while the following article gives a brief overview: How "Caucasoids" Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton, Leonard Lieberman, Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 1, February 2001, pp. 69–95.
  37. ^ "People and races", Alice Mossie Brues, Waveland Press, 1990, notes how the term Caucasoid replaced Caucasian.
  38. ^ Blumenfeld, Jodi (2000). "Racial Identification in the Skull and Teeth". U. Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology. 8 (4): 20-30.
  39. ^ Bass, William M. 1995. Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual. Columbia: Missouri Archaeological Society, Inc.
  40. ^ Eckert, William G. 1997. Introduction to Forensic Science. United States of America: CRC Press, Inc.
  41. ^ Gill, George W. 1998. "Craniofacial Criteria in the Skeletal Attribution of Race. " In Forensic Osteology: Advances in the Identification of Human Remains. (2nd edition) Reichs, Kathleen l(ed.), pp. 293–315.
  42. ^ Krogman, Wilton Marion and Mehmet Yascar Iscan 1986. The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine. Springfield: Charles C.Thomas.
  43. ^ Racial Identification in the Skull and Teeth, Totem: The University of Western, Ontario Journal of Anthropology, Volume 8, Issue 1 2000 Article 4.
  44. ^ Diana Smay, George Armelagos (2000). "Galileo wept: A critical assessment of the use of race of forensic anthropolopy" (PDF). Transforming Anthropology. 9 (2): 22–24. doi:10.1525/tran.2000.9.2.19. Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  45. ^ "A genome-wide association scan implicates DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3, PAX1 and EDAR in human facial variation". Nature Communications. 7: 11616. 2016. Bibcode:2016NatCo...711616A. doi:10.1038/ncomms11616. Retrieved November 12, 2016. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  46. ^ "A genome-wide association scan in admixed Latin Americans identifies loci influencing facial and scalp hair features". Nature Communications. 2016. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  47. ^ Different genetic components in the Norwegian population revealed by the analysis of mtDNA & Y chromosome polymorphisms Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine
  48. ^ Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th edition, 1885–90, T11, p. 476.
  49. ^ The Veddoid periphery, Hadhramaut to Baluchistan
  50. ^ Coon, Carleton (1966). The Living Races of Man. Knopf. pp. 207–208. Retrieved December 28, 2017.
  51. ^ T. H. Huxley, On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870).
  52. ^ Simpson, George Eaton; Yinger, John Milton (1985). Racial and cultural minorities: an analysis of prejudice and discrimination, Environment, development, and public policy. Springer. p. 32. ISBN 0-306-41777-4.
  53. ^ American anthropologist, American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Society of Washington (Washington, D.C,), 1984 v. 86, nos. 3–4, p. 741.
  54. ^ Grolier Incorporated (2001). Encyclopedia Americana, Volume 6. Grolier Incorporated. p. 85. ISBN 0-7172-0134-1.
  55. ^ Wells, H. G. (1921). The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind. The Macmillan Company. pp. 119–23, 236–38. Retrieved August 8, 2017.
  56. ^ "The Earliest Europeans". Archaeology. Retrieved June 30, 2015.
  57. ^ Reply to Jantz, R. L.; Owsley, D. W. (2003). "Reply to Van Vark et al.: Is European Upper Paleolithic cranial morphology a useful analogy for early Americans?". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 121 (2): 185. doi:10.1002/ajpa.10188.
  58. ^ "Getting Here: The Story of Human Evolution", 1997, Compass Press, p. 188.
  59. ^ The Origin of Races. Random House Inc., 1962, p. 570.
  60. ^ Coon, Carleton Stevens (1939). The Races of Europe. The Macmillan Company. pp. 26–28, 50–55.
  61. ^ Simpson, Pat. "Beauty and the Beast: Imaging Human Evolution at the Darwin Museum, Moscow in the Early Revolutionary Period". AAH Conference 2012. Retrieved February 4, 2015.
  62. ^ Norton HL; Kittles RA; Parra E; et al. (March 2007). "Genetic evidence for the convergent evolution of the very light skin found in Northern Europeans and some East Asians". Mol. Biol. Evol. 24 (3): 710–22. doi:10.1093/molbev/msl203. PMID 17182896.
  63. ^ Gibbons A (April 2007). "American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting. European skin turned pale only recently, gene suggests". Science. 316 (5823): 364. doi:10.1126/science.316.5823.364a. PMID 17446367.
  64. ^ Iosif Lazaridis; et al. (2016). "Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East" (PDF). Nature. 536 (7617): 4. Retrieved April 18, 2018. bottom-left: Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG), top-left: Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG), bottom-right: Neolithic Levant and Natufians, top-right: Neolithic Iran. This suggests the hypothesis that diverse ancient West Eurasians can be modelled as mixtures of as few as four streams of ancestry related to these population {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |last1= (help)
  65. ^ How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’, NY Times, 23 March 2018
  66. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin (2003). "Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian" (PDF). Yale University. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 20, 2013. Retrieved October 9, 2006. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  67. ^ Karen R. Humes; Nicholas A. Jones; Roberto R. Ramirez, eds. (March 2011). "Definition of Race Categories Used in the 2010 Census" (PDF). United States Census Bureau. p. 3. Retrieved April 25, 2014.
  68. ^ Coulson, Doug (2015). "British Imperialism, the Indian Independence Movement, and the Racial Eligibility Provisions of the Naturalization Act: United States v. Thind Revisited". Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives. 7: 1–42. SSRN 2610266.
  69. ^ "Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians", History Matters
  70. ^ "Other Notable MeSH Changes and Related Impact on Searching: Ethnic Groups and Geographic Origins". NLM Technical Bulletin. 335 (Nov–Dec). 2003. The MeSH term Racial Stocks and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004. A new heading, Continental Population Groups, has been created with new identification that emphasize geography.

Bibliography

Literature
  • Augstein, HF (1999). "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond". In Harris, Bernard; Ernst, Waltraud (eds.). Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960. New York: Routledge. pp. 58–79. ISBN 0-415-18152-6.
  • Baum, Bruce (2006). The rise and fall of the Caucasian race: a political history of racial identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-9892-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1775) On the Natural Varieties of Mankind – the book that introduced the concept
  • Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (2000). Genes, Peoples and Languages. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9486-X.
  • Gould, Stephen Jay (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-01489-4. – a history of the pseudoscience of race, skull measurements, and IQ inheritabilit
  • Guthrie, Paul (1999). The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman. Chicago: Research Associates School Times. ISBN 0-948390-49-2.
  • Piazza, Alberto; Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca; Menozzi, Paolo (1996). The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02905-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help) – a major reference of modern population genetics
  • Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop (1924). Racial Realities in Europe. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
  • Wolf, Eric R.; Cole, John N. (1999). The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21681-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Caucasian_race&oldid=878199712"