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The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, Europid, or Europoid) is an obsolete racial classification of 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 all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, 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 Phenotype 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 people" or of , , or 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.
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, , 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."
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. Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by many people. Meiners 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.
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. Following Meiners, Blumenbach described the Caucasian race as consisting of the native inhabitants of Europe, West Asia, the Indian peninsula, and North Africa. This usage later grew into the widely used color terminology for race, contrasting with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid.
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. 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. 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. He argued that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the "Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.
Coon argued that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnons, and were present in the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids.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 Dolichocephaly (e.g. Galley Hill, Combe-Capelle, Téviec) and Neolithic Mediterranean Homo sapiens (e.g. Muge, Long barrow, Corded), as well as Neanderthal-influenced brachycephaly Homo sapiens dating to the Mesolithic and Neolithic (e.g. Mechta-Afalou, Hvellinge, Fjelkinge).
Coon's theories on race were much disputed in his lifetime, and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.
19th century classifications of the peoples of India were initially uncertain if the Dravidians and the Sinhalese people were Caucasoid or a separate Dravida race, but by and in the 20th century, anthropologists predominantly declared Dravidians to be Caucasoid.
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". American anthropologist, American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Society of Washington (Washington, D.C.), 1984 v. 86, nos. 3–4, p. 741.
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 (Nordic) and Melanochroi (Mediterranean) types.T. H. Huxley, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind", Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870).
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.
The "Northcaucasian race" is a sub-race proposed by Carleton S. Coon (1930).Carleton S. Coon, The Races of Europe (1930)
Race and Racism: An Introduction (see also) by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, pp 127–133, December 8, 2005,
It comprises the native populations of the North Caucasus, the Balkars, Karachays and Vainakhs (Chechen people and Ingushs). School Bakai - Ethnogenesis the North Caucasus indigenous population
An introduction to anthropology, published in 1953, gives a more complex classification scheme:
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.
In Australia, the federal and state police forces continue to use the descriptor Caucasian, along with Aboriginal, Asian, and other .
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 Asia and Northern Asia, including the Ainu people, 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.
(2025). 9780268041489, University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 9780268041489 (2025). 9781565848870, New Press. ISBN 9781565848870
Criticism based on modern genetics
After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races, Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "The answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."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 (pp. 346-361). Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. .
Classification
In the 19th century Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1885–1890), Caucasoid was one of the three great races of humankind, alongside Mongoloid race and Negroid race. 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 race (Indo-European), Semitic race (Semitic languages), and Hamitic race (Hamitic languages i.e. Berber languages-Cushitic-Egyptian). Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th edition, 1885–90, T11, p. 476.
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."Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper", 1722–1789, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 169–74.Bertoletti, Stefano Fabbri. 1994. The anthropological theory of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In Romanticism in science, science in Europe, 1790–1840. Later anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th century such as James Cowles Prichard, Charles Pickering, Paul Broca, Paul Topinard, Samuel George Morton, Oscar Peschel, Charles Gabriel Seligman, Robert Bennett Bean, William Zebina Ripley, Alfred Cort Haddon and Roland Dixon came to recognize other Caucasoid morphological features, such as prominent supraorbital ridges and a sharp nasal sill.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. Many anthropologists in the 20th century used the term "Caucasoid" in their literature, such as William Clouser Boyd, Reginald Ruggles Gates, Carleton S. Coon, Sonia Mary Cole, Alice Mossie Brues and Grover Krantz replacing the earlier term "Caucasian" as it had fallen out of usage."People and races", Alice Mossie Brues, Waveland Press, 1990, notes how the term Caucasoid replaced Caucasian.
Subraces
The postulated subraces vary depending on the author, including but not limited to Mediterranean, Atlantid race, Nordic race, East Baltic, Alpine race, Dinaric race, Turanid race, Armenoid race, Iranid race, Indid race, Arabid race, and Hamitic. Some authors also proposed a Pamirid race (or Pamir-Fergana race) in Central Asia, named after the Pamir range and the Fergana valley. Памиро-ферганская раса — article from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd edition).
Usage in the United States and Australia
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". "White" also appears as a self-reporting entry in the U.S. Census. 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. 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. "Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians", History Matters 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 rarely used.
See also
Notes
Bibliography
Literature
(1999). 9780520216815, University of California Press. ISBN 9780520216815
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