Typical Caucasoid skull

Caucasoid is a racial classification usually used as part of a phenotypal system, also including other classifications such as Australoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and sometimes others such as Capoid. Download high resolution version (696x1046, 18 KB)Caucasoid Racial type skull This work is copyrighted. ... Download high resolution version (696x1046, 18 KB)Caucasoid Racial type skull This work is copyrighted. ... A hippopotamus skull A skull, or cranium, is a bony structure of Craniates which serves as the general framework for a head. ... The phenotype of an individual organism is either its total physical appearance and constitution or a specific manifestation of a trait, such as size or eye color, that varies between individuals. ... Australoid is a broad racial sub-classification of black peoples having generally dark skin and coarse hair which can be curly, straight, or kinky. ... Typical Mongoloid Skull A portrait of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan; the Mongolians, for which the term Mongoloid was named after, are an example of the prototype Northern Mongoloid. ... Skull of the classic Negroid phenotype, exhibiting a pronounced dolichocephalism and both maxillary and alveolar prognathisms Negroid is a anthropological term used to describe a lineage group of humans indigenous to sub-Saharan and West Africa and portions of North Africa. ... Main article: Khoisan One of the five macro-racial groups often recognized by physical anthropologists (along with Negroids, Australoids, Caucasoids and Mongoloids). ...

Geographic scope

Physical anthropology defines Caucasoid with a pattern of physical traits typical of humans indigenous to an area including Europe, South Asia, West Asia and parts of North Africa and Central Asia. 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. Physical anthropology, often called biological anthropology, studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution. ... Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents of Earth which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiographic one. ... South Asia or Southern Asia is a southern geopolitical region of the Asian continent comprising territories on and in proximity to the Indian subcontinent. ... A map showing Southwest Asia - The term Middle East is more often used to refer to both Southwest Asia and some North African countries Southwest Asia, or West Asia, is the southwestern part of Asia. ...  Northern Africa (UN subregion)  geographic, including above North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The Ainu (pronounced , eye-noo, アイヌ / aynu) are an ethnic group indigenous to Hokkaido, the northern part of Honshu in Northern Japan, the Kuril Islands, much of Sakhalin, and the southernmost third of the Kamchatka peninsula. ... Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ...

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. The term prehistory (Greek words προ = before and ιστορία = history) is usually used to describe the period before written history became available. ... Forensics or forensic science is the application of science to questions which are of interest to the legal system. ... -oid is a suffix much used in the sciences and mathematics to indicate a similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, -oid is derived from the Latin suffix -oides taken from Greek and meaning having the likeness of. Thus, asteroid means like a star... Look up Caucasian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Caucasian was originally a geographical term, meaning relative or pertaining to the Caucasus region (Caucasia) of central Eurasia. ...

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. This article does not cite its references or sources. ... The term Caucasian race is used almost exclusively in North America to refer to people whose ancestry can be traced back to Europe, North Africa, West Asia, South Asia and parts of Central Asia. ...

Racial classification and even the existence of race is controversial. Please see Race, Validity of human races, Race (historical definitions), Scientific racism, Eurocentrism 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, while Eurocentrists see definitions of Negroid that extend into Europe and South Asia in the same manner. The term race distinguishes a population of humans from other populations. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Race. ... Map of skin-color distribution for native populations collected by Renato Biasutti prior to 1940. ... Scientific racism is racist propaganda disguised as science. ... Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. ... Afrocentrism holds that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect or denial of the contributions of Africas original peoples and focused instead on a generally European-centered model of world civilization and history. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with afrocentricity. ... Ancient Egypt was a civilization located along the Lower Nile, reaching from the Nile Delta in the north to as far south as Jebel Barkal at the time of its greatest extension (15th century BC). ... White is a color (more accurately it contains all the colors of the visible spectrum and is sometimes described as an achromatic color—black is the absence of color) that has high brightness but zero hue. ... BLACK is a first-person shooter for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, developed by Criterion Software and published by Electronic Arts. ... Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. ...

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. Alternately, these similarites may result from adaptations from natural selection, since Caucasoids in Ice Age Europe occupied the same environmental niche as the Neanderthals. Binomial name Homo neanderthalensis King, 1864 The Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) or Neandertal was a species of the Homo genus that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia from about 230,000 to 29,000 years ago, during the Middle Paleolithic period. ... In paleoanthropology, the single-origin hypothesis (or Out-of-Africa model) is one of two accounts of the origin of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. ... This article is in need of attention. ... Variations in CO2, temperature and dust from the Vostok ice core over the last 400 000 years For the animated movie, see Ice Age (movie). ...

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. 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. (Other studies place Mongoloids as closer to the Australoids; then these two next cluster with Caucasoids before joining Negroids.) Some of these genetic patterns may be due to natural selection for disease resistance, rather than indicative of origin. Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ... See Supercluster for use of the word in astronomy. ... In statistics, principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique that can be used to simplify a dataset; more formally it is a linear transformation that chooses a new coordinate system for the data set such that the greatest variance by any projection of the data set comes to lie on... Categories: People stubs | 1922 births | Italian people | Population geneticists ... A blood type is a description an individuals characteristics of red blood cells due to substances (carbohydrates and proteins) on the cell membrane. ... The initialism HLA can stand for: Hapag Lloyd Airlines,a German charter airline Harvey L. Atwater, a U.S. politician Henry Louis Aaron, a baseball player High Level Architecture, a distributed computer simulation standard House of Lords Act, a U.K. constitutional reform Human Leukocyte Antigen, a key part of... The Indigenous Australians are the first inhabitants of the Australian continent and its nearby islands, continuing their presence during European settlement. ...

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. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is DNA which is not located in the nucleus of the cell but in the mitochondria. ... Mongoloid was formerly used to describe people with Down syndrome, but this use is now discouraged because it is considered offensive. ... For other uses, see Human (disambiguation). ...

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 many anthropologists. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

External links

• Caucasoid Subraces Classification by Carleton S. Coon.