Comment on White AI faces judged human more often than actual human faces

• Mahlzeit@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s no rational, scientific connection between the Caucasus and the American race term. I’m not even sure if Americans would consider Caucasians all that white, given that many of them are muslim; like the Chechen ethnicity.

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  • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The term comes from an old theory that said that humanity started out in the Caucasus and spread from there, people becoming darker as they were exposed to more sun. The guy who made that theory wasn’t racist, but his work was used by racists (and he railed against that, saying things like "there’s villages in Africa with greater artistic and philosophical output than "). He was a scientist and interpreted archaeological evidence – which we now understand to be the evidence for the Urheimat, and spread of, Indo-European people. Who came to the Caucasus, just like everyone else, from Africa, but that evidence hadn’t been unearthed yet. (Technically the Urheimat is probably the Ukrainian plains, not mountains, but close enough).

    There’s actually multiple different mutations which contribute to whiteness, all caused by the double-whammy of not getting as much vitamin d from the sun, and not getting as much vitamin d from meat with the advent of agriculture. Pre-agricultural Europeans (hunter-gatherers, pastoralists) were actually quite a bit tanner than we are now, the original Proto-Indo-Europeans were (very probably) nomadic cattle herders and thus probably also tanner, agriculture came from the Euphrat/Tigris region.

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    • Mahlzeit@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The term comes from an old theory that said that humanity started out in the Caucasus and spread from there, people becoming darker as they were exposed to more sun.

      Not quite. The guy who coined the term, Blumenbach, believed that the Caucasians (in particular the Georgians) were the most beautiful and therefore must have been the original humans. Maybe “old theory” means the biblical belief that “Noah’s Ark” stranded in the Caucasus Mountains. I don’t know that Blumenbach used that as a justification. Biblical race doctrines defined races as descent from different sons of Noah.

      The Caucasians are certainly far from the palest people on the planet. The south of the region is part of Turkey and Iran. Those are maybe the most well-known countries and the region and I’m sure that no one pictures very pale people. I remember an article about the considerable diplomatic and PR efforts that Turkey undertook in the early 20th century to be made a white country under US law. I wish I could recall the details.

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