Mongoloid - Populations Included

Populations Included

The term "Mongoloid" comes from the Mongol people who caused great terror throughout Eurasia during the Mongol Empire invasions, and the new appearance of the Mongols and paranoia was used throughout the Western world to create a new racial classification. The words "Mongol", "Mongolian", "Mongoloid" were extensively used throughout European history since the 13th century usually in a negative manner. However in the modern sense, "Mongol" refers to the Mongol ethnic group and "Mongolian" refers to something related with the country of Mongolia not necessarily in terms of ethnicity. The first use of the term Mongolian race was by Christoph Meiners in a "binary racial scheme". His "two races" were labeled "Tartar-Caucasians", which comprised Celtic and Slavic groups, and "Mongolians".

Johann Blumenbach said he borrowed the term Mongolian from Christoph Meiners to describe the race he designated "second, includes that part of Asia beyond the Ganges and below the river Amoor, which looks toward the south, together with the islands and the greater part of these countries which is now called Australian".

In 1861, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire added the Australian as a secondary race (subrace) of the principal race of Mongolian. In the nineteenth century Georges Cuvier used the term Mongolian again as a racial classification, but additionally included American Indians under the term. Arthur de Gobineau defined the extent of the Mongolian race, "by the yellow the Altaic, Mongol, Finnish and Tartar branches." Later, Thomas Huxley used the term Mongoloid and included American Indians as well as Arctic Native Americans. Other nomenclatures were proposed, such as Mesochroi (middle color), but Mongoloid was widely adopted.

In 1882 Augustus Henry Keane said the Mongolic type included the following races: Tibetans, Burmese, Tai, Koreans, Japanese, Lu-Chu, Finno-Tatars and Malays. Keane said the following peoples are mixed Mongolo-Caucasic varieties: Anatolian Turks, Uzbegs, and Tajiks of Turkestan. Keane said the Kazaks are intermediate between the Túrki and Mongolian races. Keane said the Mongolian race is best represented by the Buriats.

In 1940, anthropologist Franz Boas included the American race as part of the Mongoloid race of which he mentioned the Aztecs of Mexico and the Maya of Yucatan. Boas also said that, out of the races of the Old World, the American native had features most similar to the east Asiatic.

In 1983, Douglas J. Futuyma, professor of evolutionary processes at the University of Michigan, said that the inclusion of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders under the Mongoloid race was not recognized by many anthropologists who consider them distinct races.

In 1984, Roger J. Lederer Professor of Biological Sciences at the California State University at Chico, separately listed the Mongoloid race from Pacific islanders and American Indians when he enumerated the "geographical variants of the same species known as races... we recognize several races Inuit, American Indians, Mongoloid... Polynesian".

In 1995, Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr of the Department of Biological Anthropology at Cambridge University said all Asian populations are grouped under the name "Mongoloid".

In 1998, Jack D. Forbes, professor of Native American Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, said that the racial type of the indigenous people of the Americas does not fall into the Mongoloid racial category. Forbes said that due to the various physical traits indigenous Americans exhibit, some with "head shapes which seem hardly distinct from many Europeans", indigenous Americans must have either been formed from a mixture of Mongoloid and Caucasoid races or they descend from the ancestral, common type of both Mongoloid and Caucasoid races.

Markku Niskanen (2002) of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland, disputes past claims that Finno-Ugrians are Mongoloid. Niskanen claims that the reality is that Baltic-Finns, Saami, Volga-Finns, Permian-Finns and Hungarians are "phenotypically and genetically typical Europeans". Niskanen claims the strong cheekbones and flaring zygomatic arches considered to be evidence that Finno-Ugrians are "Mongoloid" are, in actuality, inherited from Cro-Magnons. Furthermore, Niskanen refutes the claim that Finno-Ugrians have Mongoloid-looking facial flatness by showing Finns and Saami facial flatness is "close to the European average" and claiming Finns and Saami both "possess North European craniofacial configuration". In terms of genetics, Niskanen claims Finns are genetically close to their "Germanic-speaking neighbors (the Swedes, Germans, and Norwegians)" although he admits Finns are "somewhat less distant" to the Japanese and Mongols than Europeans are on average. Niskanen claims that the Y-chromosomal DNA supposedly showing "eastern paternal genetic contribution" in the gene pools of Finno-Ugrians, since it is "found most commonly among Asians", is, in actuality, a genetic marker of "late Ice Age population expansion". Niskanen disputes the claim that the commonality of a Uralic language means Finno-Ugrians are Mongoloid like the Samoyeds, arguing that the Samoyeds speak a Uralic language due to them having been linguistically assimilated and arguing that the genetic evidence shows Finno-Ugrians and Samoyeds "diverged a very long time ago".

In contrast to Niskanen, geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University (1994) said that the Saame were shown by genetic analysis to be 47.5% Mongoloid and 52.5% Caucasoid with a standard error of ± 4.9%. Cavalli-Sforza said the Saami's Caucasoid side of their DNA came "probably from Scandinavia" while their Mongoloid side is of "Siberian origin".

In 2004, Hitoshi Chiba (千葉仁志, Chiba Hitoshi?) et al. of the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Hokkaido University Hospital, Sapporo, Japan, performed "particle agglutination tests for serum HTLV-I antibody" on 400 ethnic Saami to determine if they had the HTLV-I antibody that would link them to Asiatic Mongoloids and they found that the Saami were lacking this antibody. Chiba et al. concluded that if Saami were related to the Asiatic Mongoloid, the relationship would either have to involve "Neolithic rather than Upper Paleolithic populations" or the Saami would have to have been mixed with a group that lacked the antibody.