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It has been suggested that this article be merged into Caucasian race. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2006.

The Caucasoid race is one of five racial categories as defined by the physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon in 1934. Sarah A Tishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd state, "Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people."

The other four races that Coon defined were the Mongoloid race, the Australoid race, the Negroid race and the Capoid race. These racial classifications were made on the basis of physical features. According to Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, The concept of race has all but been completely rejected by modern mainstream anthropology.

The European Bioinformatics Institute defines Caucasoid as an ethnic group (rather than a race) which has "historical origins in Europe, North Africa or Southwestern Asia, including India". The Institute identifies eight ethnic groups: American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, Black, Caucasoid, Hispanic, Mixed, Oriental and Pacific Islander..

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Caucasoid as as noun or adjective meaning Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Caucasian race. The suffix -oid can indicate "a similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else", so Caucasoid can mean "resembling" the Caucasian race, itself a term with an inexact definition. Likewise, it can mean pertaining to or belonging to the Caucasian race.

In the past, the National Library of Medicine used the term Caucasoid as a "racial stock" term (the other "racial stocks" were Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid). The "racial stock" categorization scheme was replaced in 2004 with Continental Population Groups which focuses on geographic origins.

Genetics

One of the four regions that emerge as a result of genetic clustering studies is "Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas". This area is similar to the area defined by European Bioinformatics Institute about Caucasoids. According to Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College London, these clusters correspond to "more or less the major races of traditional anthropology".

According to the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Races of traditional anthropology include Caucasoid.. Some individuals from boundary locations between these regions were inferred to have partial ancestry in the clusters that corresponded to both sides of the boundary. In many cases, subclusters that corresponded to individual populations or to subsets of populations were also identified. This line of thinking is disputed though.

Footnotes

1. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html
2. Tishkoff, S. A., and Kidd, K. K. Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine: Nature Genetics, 36, S21 - S27 (2004)  
3. Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13
4. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/imgt/hla/help/ethnic_help.html
5. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50034773?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=Caucasoid&first=1&max_to_show=10
6. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C008/037.html
7. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd03/nd03_med_data_changes.html
8. http://www.genomecenter.howard.edu/News%20documents/Position%20Paper%2010-24-04.doc
9. http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0010070#journal-pgen-0010070-b003

See also

• Race
• ‎Race and multilocus allele clusters
• Genetic views on race
• Caucasian race
• Caucasian peoples
• European American
• European people
• Craniofacial Anthropometry
• White people

• Articles to be merged from December 2006
• Physical anthropology
• Race