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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called 'The Father of Physical Anthropology' because of his pioneering publications describing human racial variation. He proposed a racial typology consisting of five 'major varieties/races' of humanity.
At the beginning of the story, we have the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by the publication of the book Systema naturae in 1735, in which the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a classification of humankind into four distinct races.
The Origin of Races: Carleton S. Coon: 9780394301426: Amazon.com: Books.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
The first organized automobile competition, a reliability test in 1894 from Paris to Rouen, France, a distance of about 80 km (50 mi), was won with an average speed of 16.4 kph (10.2 mph). In 1895 the first true race was held, from Paris to Bordeaux, France, and back, a distance of 1,178 km.
Blumenbach's classification of the single human species into five varieties (later called "races") (1793/1795): the Caucasian or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for Europeans, and he also included Middle Easterners and South Asians in the same category.
5. Genetic distance estimates suggest that among the three major races of man the first divergence occurred about 120,000 years ago between Negroid and a group of Caucasoid and Mongoloid and then the latter group split into Caucasoid and Mongoloid around 60,000 years ago.
(A) The old concept of the “five races:” African, Asian, European, Native American, and Oceanian. According to this view, variation between the races is large, and thus, the each race is a separate category. Additionally, individual races are thought to have a relatively uniform genetic identity.
Australoid race was a word for the aboriginal people of Australia, Melanesia, and parts of Southeast Asia. In former times, many people divided human beings into four races. These races were called Australoid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid.
The word Caucasian, a rather obsolete and outdated term now, actually comes from the region of the Caucasus. After a visit to the Caucasus Mountains, a German anthropologist first used the term Caucasian for a derogatory system of racial classification dating from the 18th century.
René Lesson in 1847 presented a division into six groups based on simple color adjectives: White (Caucasian), Dusky (Indian), Orange-colored (Malay), Yellow (Mongoloid), Red (Carib and American), Black (Negroid).
The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs. They were flaking crude stone tools by 2.5 million years ago. Then some of them spread from Africa into Asia and Europe after two million years ago.
The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans.
Today, Caucasian lacks any real scientific meaning, but hangs on as a blanket term for white/European people because the U.S. legal system made use of it to shape policy and the nature of its society.
The Caucasus is a linguistically, culturally and geographically diverse region. The nation states that compose the Caucasus today are the post-Soviet states Georgia (including Adjara and Abkhazia), Azerbaijan (including Nakhchivan), Armenia, and the Russian Federation.
The first humans to leave Africa 40,000 years ago are believed to have had dark skin, which would have been advantageous in sunny climates. But humans did not uniformly develop light skin when they reached the colder regions of Europe.
The First Humans
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Neanderthal. While much of the public just thinks of them as a primitive human species that died out, that's not actually accurate. Neanderthal DNA is pretty much not found at all among African blood lines, but is found in 1 to 2 percent of European and Asian backgrounds.
According to the ROA, it is hypothesized that populations of early modern Homo sapiens migrated from Africa and entered the southern part of China around 60,000 years ago; they then dispersed northward. They replaced totally the indigenous human beings and they are the unique ancestors of the modern Chinese.
Charles Lamb wrote a famous essay, "the two races of Men." In it he refers to those who borrow and those who lend. Most people are brought up to believe it is better to lend than borrow.
Homo sapiens
Anatomically modern humans emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa, evolving from Homo heidelbergensis or a similar species and migrating out of Africa, gradually replacing or interbreeding with local populations of archaic humans. For most of history, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers.