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[37] 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".[39]
Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial
measurements and bone morphology in addition to skin pigmentation.[40] Following Meiners,
Blumenbach described the Caucasian race as consisting of the native inhabitants of Europe, West Asia,
the Indian peninsula, and North Africa.[ citation needed ] This usage later grew into the widely used color
terminology for race, contrasting with the terms Negroid , Mongoloid , and Australoid .[41]
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 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.
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.[42] 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.[42] Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously.[43]
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.[15] He argued that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the
"Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.[44]
Coon argued that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnons, and were present in the Skhul
and Qafzeh hominids.[45] 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 dolichocephalic (e.g. Galley Hill, Combe-Capelle, Téviec) and Neolithic
Mediterranean Homo sapiens (e.g. Muge, Long Barrow, Corded), as well as Neanderthal-
influenced brachycephalic Homo sapiens dating to the Mesolithic and Neolithic (e.g. Afalou, Hvellinge,
Fjelkinge).[46]