Asians - Physical Features

Physical Features

Ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton said the Asian race has yellow or olive skin, broad face, Mongolian eye form, abundance of head hair, scant beard, small stature, coarse straight hair, a round face, small black eyes and a medium-size, flat nose.

Sandy Sangrigoli et al. of the Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, used adults of Korean origin adopted by white families to test whether they were able to distinguish Caucasian faces at the level of a control group of French people who were shown to be better at distinguishing Caucasian faces than Asiatic faces. Sangrigoli found the Korean adoptees mirrored the control group by showing greater recognition of Caucasian than Asian faces, indicating the "other-race effect" of face recognition remains plastic in childhood.

Willett Enos Rotzell professor of Botany and Zoology at the Hahnemann Medical College said the Asian race has skin color ranging from a yellowish tint to an olive shade, with black and coarse hair with a circular cross section, an absent or scanty beard, a brachycephalic skull, prominent cheek bones and a broad face. Rotzell said the Asian race has its original home in Asia.

Konstantinos Moraitis (Greek:Κωνσταντίνος Μωραΐτης) of the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology School of Medicine, University of Athens, Greece, said the Asian is distinguished by a flat face, rounded orbits, pronounced zygomatics and an intermediate nasal aperture and spine.

Several studies have suggested that East Asian skull size and cranial capacity are larger than that of Caucasians or Africans. J. Philippe Rushton, psychologist and author of the controversial work Race, Evolution and Behavior (1995), analyzed Gould's retabulation in 1989, reporting that Samuel Morton, in his 1839 book Crania Americana, had shown a pattern of decreasing brain size proceeding from East Asians, to Europeans, to Africans. Rushton alleged an average endocranial volume of 1,364 cm³ for East Asians, 1,347 for white caucasians and 1,268 for black Africans. Similar claims were also made by Ho et al. (1980), who measured 1,261 brains at autopsy, and Beals et al. (1984), who measured approximately 20,000 skulls, both finding the same pattern.

Dennis C. Dirkmaat professor of paleoanthropology and archaeology at Mercyhurst University said that Southeast Asian skulls can be distinguished from Asian and Native American skulls in that they are "smaller and less robust" with noses exhibiting a medium width without nasal overgrowth, and can "exhibit gracile features common to female skulls".

A 2009 study of facial detection technology found the technology incorrectly classified more "Mongoloids" or "Asian" male faces as females relative to its error rate for the "Caucasian... and Negroid races". Dirkmaat also said that body measurements of the "average Asian male" may fall within the range of those of the "American white female".