Anybody got the straight dope on the word “caucasian”?
I assume you mean ‘as a synonym for white/European people’?
It comes from J.F. Blumenbach, whose seminal work in anthropology established the notion of different races of humans. He divided the species into 4 (later 5) different races - Caucasian, Ethiopian, American, Mongolian, and Malayan. (He was wrong, of course. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is a good book on that topic.)
The reason for choosing the Caucasus is that he thought Georgian girls were hot. Actually, Georgian skulls I guess. He believed that humans had spread over the world from one common point, and apparently thought that the most beautiful physical characteristics (white folks, to him) should be the first. Despite the fact that he believed that non-white races were ‘degraded’ from the Caucasian, this was only a physical distinction for him; aside from aesthetics, he was not a racist.
I’m getting this from ScienceDaily.com:
In physical anthropology, Caucasian is a purported race that includes most of the natives of Europe, West Asia, North Africa, and as far east as the Indian subcontinent. This category was first proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who coined the term in his treatise “On the Natural Varieties of Mankind” in 1775. His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the inhabitants of Georgia in the Caucasus mountains.
Unfortunately, you sort of had to know to put “skull” in your Google search.
A voter in Iowa? 
My reading of a few other sources would indicate that Blumenbach didn’t use the term in his first(1775) edition(his doctoral dissertation) , nor in the second edition(1781). He did a third edition(1795) in which he finally came up with a word, but I don’t think it was “caucasian.” It might be ‘Caucasoid’ or some such, but I’d love to see the actual word.
The OED and other sources first cite the actual term “caucasian” from 1807.
I’d always heard that the word described people living west of the Caucus Mountains.
Some answers in Dex’s Straight Dope Staff Report Why do we say “Caucasian” to mean a person of European ancestry?
I came across this quote from Blumenbach a few months ago in a book by Leon Poliakov (probably The Aryan Myth)
Obviously the quotation as above is a translation. As far as I can tell, De L’unité Du Genre Humain was first published in 1803.
Minor hijack. I’ve always associated the Caucasian “race” with the Indo-European language group, although that’s only been because I thought that they both originated somewhere around the Caucasuses. Is there any validity to that?
All that fitted in quite nicely for me (an atheist) with a program I saw that placed Eden in the same area (although they didn’t try to make anything out of it’s location). Please don’t destroy all my tenuous links here .
A good deal of Africa is west of the Caucasus.
<hijack> I’ve seen a few shows on the possible locations of the Garden and I believe the general consensus is that Bahrain fit the bill best. (It wasn’t always just desert, but was at one time rather lush and verdant <end hijack>