Russia's Caucasus

The area was recently in the news due to the Boston bombers. One interesting tidbit is that the area is responsible for people being called Caucasian.

It all began in the late 1700s when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided Homo sapiens into five distinct 'varieties' based on their physical characteristics. There was the Mongolian or yellow variety, the red American variety, the brown Malayan variety, the black Ethiopian variety, and the white Caucasian variety.

Caucasians are some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia/Middle East, Asia Minor, and Central Asia. The name stems from the Caucasus Mountain Range, where the people who most resembled his definition came from. He did not specifically say they were just white. He described the characteristics as Color white, cheeks rosy, hair brown or chestnut-colored, head subglobular, face oval straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow slightly hooked, and mouth small.

The term 'Caucasian race' was coined by German philosopher Christoph Meiners in 1785. In Meiners' racial classification, there were only two racial divisions, Caucasians and Mongolians.

Currently Caucasian lacks any real scientific meaning, but is commonly used, especially on TV cop shows, as a blanket term, for white/European people. Caucasoid is the new term anthropologists use.

The US court, in Ozawa v. United States declared skin color was irrelevant in determining whether or not a person could be classified as "white" and instead emphasized ancestry. The United States National Library of Medicine discontinued using Caucasian in favor of the geographical term "European", which traditionally only applied to a subset of Caucasoids.

Bottom line - the terms used for race, 'variety', ethnicity, and other characteristics of humans is not currently universally agreed to. I tend to agree with Shakespeare view, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".