Origin
Anthropologists generally consider the Cro-Magnons to be the earliest or "proto" representatives of the Caucasoid race, who emerged during the Upper Paleolithic. In a study of Cro-Magnon crania, Jantz and Owsley (2003) have noted that: "Upper Paleolithic crania are, for the most part, larger and more generalized versions of recent Europeans."
William Howells (1997) has pointed out that Cro-Magnons were Caucasoid based on their cranial traits:
"...the Cro-Magnons were already racially European, i.e., Caucasoid. This has always been accepted because of the general appearance of the skulls: straight faces, narrow noses, and so forth. It is also possible to test this arithmetically. Except for Predmosti 4, which is distant from every present and past population, all of these skulls show themselves to be closer to "Europeans" than to other peoples — Mladec and Abri Pataud comfortably so, the other two much more remotely."Proponents of the multiregional origin of modern humans argue that Caucasoid traits emerged prior to the Cro-Magnon, in the Skhul and Qafzeh hominids or Neanderthals. Carleton Coon (1962) for example considered the Skhul IV specimen as a proto-Caucasoid. He further argued that the Caucasoid race is of dual origin, consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of H. sapiens and neanderthalensis) types and Mediterranean (purely H. sapiens) types.
Read more about this topic: Caucasian Race
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
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“Each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.”
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)