DO WHITE PEOPLE REALLY COME FROM THE CAUCASUS?
By Derek Thompson
Slate
Aug 19 2008
How Caucasians got their name.
Russia continues to occupy the former Soviet state of Georgia, despite
agreeing to a cease-fire last week. "The Caucasus is a difficult
and complicated place," one Russian political scientist told the
Financial Times, referring to the small mountainous region between
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea that comprises Georgia, Armenia,
and Azerbaijan. Wait, do white people really come from the Caucasus?
It’s highly unlikely. There are scholarly disagreements about how
and when some of our dark-skinned ancestors developed lighter skin,
but research suggests humans moved across the Asian and European
continents about 50,000 years ago. Some anthropologists think that
natural selection would have favored lightening mutations as humans
moved away from the equator and faced a diminished threat from
ultraviolet exposure. In this case, it’s possible that light skin
would have evolved in many places independently.
So why do we call white people Caucasians? The term was popularized by
the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who in 1795 divided
the human species into five races: Caucasian, the "white" race;
Mongolian, the "yellow" race; Malayan, the "brown" race; Ethiopian,
the "black" race; and American, the "red" race. He considered the
Caucasians to be the first race on Earth, consistent with the common
conception of the Caucasus as a place of human origin. The Bible
describes Noah landing his ark at a place called Mount Ararat, which
was thought by Europeans of Blumenbach’s time to be on the modern
Turkish-Armenian border. (Ararat is still the name of the largest
mountain in Turkey.) In Greek mythology, Zeus chained Prometheus to
a rock in the Caucasus.