Why white people got named after a mountain range between Europe and Asia
Calling people of European descent Caucasian goes back to eighteenth-century scholars who believed humanity began in the Caucasus Mountains, where Noah's Ark was said to have landed. German academics turned that belief into a racial category in the 1780s. Modern genetics has since thrown the whole scheme out, though the word survives on American forms.
The Caucasus held a special place in European imagination. Besides the Ark, it was where Greek myth placed the torment of Prometheus, who in Hesiod's telling shaped people out of clay. Europeans also prized the region's inhabitants as the most beautiful people on earth: the idea of the Circassian beauty dated to the Middle Ages, and travellers such as Jean Chardin spread admiration for Georgians. Origins and good looks fused into a flattering story about where Europeans came from.
Two scholars at Göttingen made it a classification. Christoph Meiners used Caucasian in a broad racial sense in 1785, inside a crude ranking of superior and inferior peoples. His colleague Johann Friedrich Blumenbach popularised the label in 1795, dressing it in skull measurements and Linnaean taxonomy, though unlike Meiners he held that all humans shared a single origin. Blumenbach also wrongly assumed light skin was the ancestral human colour. Even he noticed there were no sharp boundaries between the supposed groups, a point Charles Darwin later made too.
Supporters never agreed where the category ended. In 1939 Carleton Coon stretched it across Central and Northern Asia, and in 1962 he argued that races evolved separately from Homo erectus at different speeds, placing Caucasoids ahead; anthropologists now regard his work as pseudoscience. Proposals for how many races exist ranged from three to 300 or more.
Since the later twentieth century, anthropologists have moved from fixed types to genomic and population thinking, and treat race as a social category. The geneticist Alan Templeton summed it up in 2016: biological races do not exist in humans. The US census still uses the word, a usage that draws criticism.
Source: Caucasian race
