Race

A

Early Classifications

The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks of the Homeric period, and the Greeks and Romans of Classical times left lifelike paintings and sculptures showing racial differences. The worldwide explorations of the 16th and 17th centuries renewed the interest of Europeans in peoples of other lands, setting the stage for the systematic classification of races that began in the 18th century. Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who initiated the formal classification of all living things, considered the varieties of human beings. The German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach examined skulls and studied what was known of the peoples of the world; he concluded, in his book on the origin of native human varieties, that humanity had five races: Caucasians—West Asians, North Africans, and Europeans except Saami and Finns; Mongolians—other Asian peoples, the Finns and Saami, and the Inuit of America; Ethiopians—the people of Africa (Negroes) except those of the north; Native Americans—all aboriginal New World peoples except the Inuit; and Malayans—peoples of the Pacific Islands.

These five divisions, sometimes conceived as including or excluding slightly different groups of people, remained the basis of most racial classifications into the 20th century. The Native Americans and the Malayans, however, are now more often classed as sub-groups of the Mongolians; and Saami and Finns are now grouped with Europeans. Blumenbach himself recognized that many people are intermediate between these races. Still, this fivefold division of human beings remains common in popular thinking, even though scientists have recognized the indefiniteness, fluidity, and arbitariness of any such “racial” demarcations.

B

Geographical Distribution

According to geographical distribution, the world's populations fall into several major and a few minor groups.

B

1

Europeans and Similar Peoples

The people of Europe are sometimes said to be of the Caucasian race because of a now-discredited theory that all peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe (as well as those of European descent elsewhere) originated in the Caucasus Mountains. When northern Europe became habitable after the Ice Age, some peoples may have migrated there from the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East. European peoples range in skin colour from swarthy to pale and in hair colour from black to ash blond, but they are generally lighter in pigment than any other peoples in the world. Blood group B is highest in eastern Europe and the Middle East; blood group A is common on the fringes of Europe—notably among the Saami of northern Finland and Norway. Height is greatest in northern Europe; hair colour is darkest in the southern parts of Europe. The Rh-negative blood type (see Rh Factor) reaches its greatest incidence among the Basques of northern Spain and southern France.

Efforts to explain the present distribution of genetic traits on the basis of known past population movements are speculative. In some cases, such as the occurrence of the sickle-cell trait in malarious regions of Italy and Greece, the advantage of resistance to malaria must have played a role. The geographical gradations of distribution in average body size and in skin, hair, and eye colour are also thought to result from the adaptive advantages of bulky, lightly pigmented people in colder, less sunny regions. On the other hand, in the relatively short time since Europeans colonized the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, no notable racial differences have developed between the descendants of the colonists and the descendants of those who remained behind. (Because the new environments were favourable, however, the descendants occupying them did grow faster and to bigger adult size.

B

2

East Asians

The largest human racial group consists of East Asians and includes Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malayans, and Thais. East Asians have sometimes been called Mongoloids, meaning “like Mongols”. Mongols have straight, black hair and a generally wide, flat face with such features as sparse beard and moustache, and a fold of skin (the epicanthic fold) that covers at least the inner corner of the eye and gives it an almond-shaped appearance. Most East Asians share these features and certain characteristics of the teeth, but the peoples of South East Asia are generally smaller, darker, and more slender than those farther north. In fact, people of South China tend to resemble other South East Asians more than they do the North Chinese. Also, it is not always possible to distinguish Chinese people from Koreans and Japanese on the basis of physical characteristics. Throughout history the peoples of the region have migrated and intermixed, so that national boundaries do not coincide with discrete sub-races in modern Asia.

B

3

American Peoples

The term “Mongoloid” has often been applied by extension to the native peoples of North and South America. The Native Americans and the Inuit and Aleut people of the northern coasts almost always have the same straight, black hair and large faces, and some of the dental characteristics of East Asians. Some of the blood group traits of Native Americans are different, however. Most tribes have high frequencies of blood group O, although the Blackfoot and surrounding groups have an unusually high incidence of blood group A₁. Except for the Inuit, blood group B in native Americans is thought to be the result of mixing with other peoples. A blood group called Diego occurs only among certain East Asian groups and among indigenous Americans. Native Americans differ in various parts of the Americas, and they differ also from East Asians in generally having more prominent noses and eyes that lack the epicanthic fold. The Aleuts and Inuit are much like East Asians in some respects, but they tend to have narrow noses and other features not found in East Asians