Expert: John Shea - 12/22/2002

Question
Hi,
I have read from various anthopolocial texts that tend to describe both the Ainu and Polynesians as possessing various physical traits similar to those found among Europeans, yet are not genetically related to them. And so they are usually refered to as being 'caucasoid' rather than 'caucasian.' But because they have no genetic links with Europeans yet still look some bit like them, I was just wondering if it would be logical to refer to them as "non-caucasian whites." I know, it obviously sounds weird, but I'd just like to know if you would agree with it.

If it were a logical statement then it would also be safe to say that non-African blacks exist as well (like the Pygmies of the Phillipines or the Maori of New Zealand, who both have no genetic links with African blacks). But that term doesn't sound as nearly as weird.

Thanks,
Ron  

Answer
Hi Ron,
The Ainu of Hokkaido do indeed look different from the Japanese populations to the south (paler skin, more body hair).  It is thought they are descended from an early population once more widespread on the Japanese archipelago that was displaced by agricultural populations who immigrated from Korea or elsewhere on the Asian mainland.
The use of the terms, "caucasoid, caucasian" reflect a typological approach to human morphological variability.  Since these  terms arbitrarily partition a continuum of morphological variability, there are inevitably going to be groups, like the Ainu or the Andamanese "Negritos", who straddle several categories, -in these cases, "caucasoids" (Ainu) or "negroids"(the Andamanese) who live in Asia. Serious anthropologists recognized these racial categories were analytically useless back in the 1960s, and haven't really used them since.  (They persist because it's a lot easier for people to organize their thoughts into typological categories than to envision the complex multivariate reality of human biological variability.)  Instead, anthropologists prefer assess population relationships more directly, with genetic evidence.  This genetic evidence suggests that all living human populations are closely related.  We share a last common ancestor who lived around 100,000-50,000 years ago.  The "racial" differences we see today probably reflect a combination of natural selection and sexual selection operating on small isolated Ice Age populations.
John J. Shea
Associate Professor
Anthropology Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY USA 11794-4364
email: John.Shea@sunysb.edu
My website:http://www.sunysb.edu/anthro/Shea%20webpage/index.html