The term “Caucasian” connotes different interpretations, depending on perspective and context.
Literally speaking, “Caucasian” refers to people from the Caucasus mountain region, which includes Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, parts of north Iran, and central southern Russia.
This is a geographical ancestry term, which could have implications for genetics if used precisely.
However, “Caucasian” today wrongly refers broadly to people coded as “White” by society, the majority of whom are actually not from the area of the Caucasus mountains.
Additionally, classifying those coded as “White” by society as “Caucasian” is a throwback to the racist classification system defined by German anatomist Johann Blumenbach in the late 1700s.
White people are called “Caucasian” because Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (17521840), an influential German scholar in an up-and-coming German university, chose the name on 11 April 1795 in Göttingen, Lower Saxony, in what would become Germany. Blumenbach’s and Göttingen’s scholarly prestige made “Caucasian” a scientific classification.
The term “Caucasian” quickly entered scientific discourse, appearing first in English in an 1807 translation of Blumenbach’s Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (A Short System of Comparative Anatomy) Lawrence (1783-1867) by the influential English surgeon William Lawrence (1783-1867).
Blumenbach differentiated five human races, which he also stratified by perceived beauty (and thus value):
- Caucasian
- Mongolian
- Malayan
- American
- Ethiopian (black)
Eugenicists in the 1920s further divided the “Caucasian” group into subraces:
Nordic Alpine Mediterranean Semitic In this framing, “Caucasian” is inherently imprecise and inaccurate, as it encompasses a huge breadth of possible genetic ancestry and cultural influences.
Carol Mukhopadhyay’s paper “Getting Rid of the Word Caucasian” from 2008 is an excellent summary of the problematic implications of continuing to use “Caucasian” when we mean White or European-American or whatever we actually mean.
Additionally, in 1998, the American Journal of Public Health published this article, “White, European, Western, Caucasian, or What? Inappropriate Labeling in Research on Race, Ethnicity, and Health,” discussing why we need to be more specific when we are using these terms in research.
Using a blanket term like Caucasian when you are actually referring to people of Scandinavian descent or Euro-Americans, for example, is not helpful either in the context of genetic or ancestral research. However, if we are discussing something like the impacts of racism, geographic origin and genetic ancestry are not particularly relevant.
Here the term “White” is most appropriate, since the differential allocation of resources to people coded as White in society is similar regardless of their geographic or genetic background.
The name “Caucasian” connects to the Caucasus, the 440,000 square kilometers of land separating the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The two ranges of the Caucasus Mountains cross the region running roughly east to west.
The northern, Caucasus range forms the natural border with Russia; the southern, lesser Caucasus forms the natural border with Turkey and Iran.
Anthropologists classify the fifty Caucasian ethnic groups into three main categories:
- Caucasian
- Indo-European
- Altaic.
Among the Altaic peoples are the Kalmuck, whom Blumenbach and his colleagues considered an embodiment of ugliness.
Circassian peoples and Georgians, famed for their beauty, also fall into the category of Caucasian people.
Known to Westerners since prehistoric times, this geographically and ethnically complex area has been subject to numerous overlords and considerable confusion.
They have sent slaves into Western Europe and Asia Minor since before the time of Herodotus.
Further investigations reveal the biblical Noah’s ark came to rest in the Caucasus mountains.
The idea that all people originated between the Black and Caspian Seas was an old one.
Genesis 6-8 mentions Mount Ararat as the ark’s resting place after the flood, and in the thirteenth century Marco Polo located Mount Ararat in Armenia.
Situated south of Georgia in eastern Turkey, at the confluence of Armenia, Iraq, and Iran in the country of the Kurds, Mount Ararat, at 5185 meters or some 17,000-ft. high, is Turkey’s highest mountain.
Blumenbach conflated the Caucasus mountains with Mount Ararat.
Western Europeans had long traced their origins to amorphous Eurasian regions, calling not only Caucasians, but also Scythians and Circassians, their beautiful, powerful-and always pre-Muslim–ancestors.
The semi-mythological Scythians were said to have ruled the Caucasus-Black Sea-Crimean-Caspian region from Paleolithic times until the seventh-century Arab conquest.
Racial Beginnings
The term “Caucasian” originated from a growing 18th-century European science of racial classification.
Johann Blumenbach visited the Caucasus Mountains, located between the Caspian and Black seas, and he must have been enchanted because he labeled the people there “Caucasians” and proposed that they were created in God’s image as an ideal form of humanity.
And the label has stuck to this day! According to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach went on to name four other “races,” each considered “physically and morally ‘degenerate’ forms of ‘God’s original creation.’”
He categorized Africans, excluding light-skinned North Africans, as “Ethiopians” or “black.”
He divided non-Caucasian Asians into two separate races:
- The “Mongolian” or “yellow” race of Japan and China, and
- The “Malayan” or “brown” race, which included Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders.
And he called Native Americans the “red” race.
This means there was no labelling (groupings) among modern humans before the 1600s.
“White People”
Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29th October 1613, the date that his play “The Triumphs of Truth” was first performed.
The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king in the play who looks out upon an English audience and declares:
“I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.”
Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of European author referring to Europeans as ‘white people’.
There are plenty of ways that one can categorise humanity, and using colour is merely a relatively recent one.
In the past, criteria other than complexion were used, including religion, etiquette, even clothing.
For example, American Indians were often compared with ancient Britons by the colonisers, who were descendants of the Britons.
The comparison was not so much physical as it was cultural, a distinction that allowed for a racial fluidity.
Yet by the time Middleton was writing, the colour line was already beginning to harden, and the arbitrary (unilateral or one-sided) manner of categorising races began to emerge.
The scholar Kim Hall explains in “Things of Darkness” (1996) that whiteness ‘truly exists only when posed next to blackness’: so the concept of ‘white people’ emerged only after constructions of ‘blackness’.
As binary oppositions, ‘whiteness’ first needed ‘blackness’ to make any sense. The two words create each other.
The scholar Virginia Mason Vaughan writes in Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (2005) that:
“Blackfaced characters in early modern dramas are often used … to make whiteness visible.
‘Black’ and ‘white’ have never referred to defined groups of people; they are abstract formulations, which still have had very real effects on actual people.”
There is little verisimilitude in describing anyone with either term, which explains their malleability over the centuries.
How arbitrary is it to categorise Sicilians and Swedes as being ‘white’, or the Igbo and Maasai as both ‘black’?
This kind of racial thinking developed as the direct result of the slave trade.
Hall explains:
“Whiteness is not only constructed by but dependent on an involvement with Africans that is the inevitable product of England’s ongoing colonial expansion.
As such, when early modern Europeans begin to think of themselves as ‘white people’ they are not claiming anything about being English, or Christian, but rather they are making comments about their self-perceived superiority, making it easier to justify the obviously immoral trade and ownership of humans.”
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.
But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world.
What About Race?
The concept of “race,” as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “white” and “slave.”
The words “race,” “white,” and “slave” were all used by Europeans in the 1500s, and they brought these words with them to North America.
However, the words did not have the meanings that they have today.
Instead, the needs of the developing American society would transform those words’ meanings into new ideas.
The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” (identifying groups of people by physical traits, appearance, or characteristics) is a human invention.
The racial identity of “white” has evolved throughout history.
Initially, it referred only to Anglo-Saxon people.
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people, nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.
In his seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Allen details the creation of the “white race” by the ruling class as a method of social control, in response to labor unrest precipitated by Bacon’s Rebellion.
Distinguishing European Americans from African Americans within the laboring class, white privileges enforced the myth of the white race through the years and has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over the entire working class.
Origin of Europeans
Modern humans have been on the move ever since a small band of people migrated out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago.
New studies of genes and isotopes are helping reveal how major migrations shaped who we are today.
The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago.
But some of those pioneers, such as a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania, have little connection to today’s Europeans, Reich says.
His team studied DNA from 51 Europeans and Asians who lived 7000 to 45,000 years ago.
They found that most of the DNA in living Europeans originated in three major migrations, starting with hunter-gatherers who came from the Middle East as the glaciers retreated 19,000 to 14,000 years ago.
In a second migration about 9000 years ago, farmers from northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Greece and Turkey, moved in.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that in 449 C.E., two Germanic tribes people, Hengist and Horsa, sailed from what is now the Netherlands to southeast England, starting a fierce conflict.
As more Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived, violence broke out with the local Britons and ended in “rivers of blood,” according to accounts by medieval monks.
Scholars have debated just how bloody that invasion was, and whether it was a mass migration or a small delegation of elite kings and their warriors.
An answer came in 2016 from a study of the ancient from DNA of Anglo-Saxons and indigenous Britons, who were buried side by side in the fifth and sixth centuries in a cemetery near Cambridge, U.K.
They lived and died together and even interbred, as shown by one person who had a mix of DNA from both Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and a genetic Briton who was buried with a large cruciform Anglo-Saxon brooch.
Although the stories stress violence, the groups “were mixing very quickly,” says Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, U.K., who co-wrote the study.
The team went on to show that 25% to 40% of the ancestry of modern Britons is Anglo-Saxon.
Even people in Wales and Scotland—thought to be Celtic strongholds—get about 30% of their DNA from Anglo-Saxons, says co-author Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K.
In biblical texts, those “uncircumcised” people are known as the bitter enemies of the Israelites; the name “Philistine” is still a slur in English.
They’re said to have lived in Canaan, between present-day Tel Aviv and Gaza in Israel.
They ate pork, battled Samson’s armies, and stole the Ark of the Covenant.
Goliath, whom David slew with a sling, was a Philistine.
But after Old Testament times, the group disappears from both scripture and historical accounts.
To find the Philistines’ origins, researchers have studied artifacts and remains from ancient Philistine cities in Israel.
The evidence, including isotopic analysis, shows that the Philistines were a motley crew of immigrants, possibly pirates, who hailed from many ports, bringing pigs from Europe and donkeys in caravans from Egypt.
“The Philistines are an entangled culture from western Anatolia, Cyprus, Greece, the Balkans, you name it,” says Maeir, who has directed excavations at the Philistine city of Gath for 2 decades.
Maeir says he thinks that the Philistines soon intermarried with people already living in Canaan instead of going extinct.
If so, the loathsome Philistines are part of the ancestral stock for both Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews.
Those groups, so full of enmity today, are genetically closely related, according to a study in 2000 of the paternally inherited Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.
Seventy percent of the Jewish men and half of the Arab men inherited their Y chromosomes from the same set of paternal ancestors who lived in the Middle East within the last few thousand years.
Also, Kashmiri of northern India do not seem to be related to Alexander the Great or the lost tribes of Israel.
Parsis in Iran and India are not solely of ancient Iranian heritage, having mixed with local Indian women, although Parsi priests do descend chiefly from just two men.
“Ethnic groups in the past and present create an ‘imagined past’ of the longtime and ‘pure’ origins of their group,” Maeir says.
But that created past often has “little true relation to the historical processes” that actually created the group, he says.
