18th-century German anatomist Johann Blumenbach kept a collection of 250 human skulls, but he found one skull particularly enchanting. “My beautiful typical head of a young Georgian female,” he wrote, “always of itself attracts every eye.” Blumenbach kindled scientific interest in whiteness when he claimed to have found five distinct varieties of humankind in his collection. While he thought these varieties—which he called “races” in 1795—were more or less equal in character and intelligence, Blumenbach ranked them in terms of what he saw as their physical perfection. Taken from the body of an unnamed Georgian woman in the Caucasus, Blumenbach’s favorite skull became the basis of his “Caucasian” race, and with that, a scientific typology of whiteness was born. Supporting the hierarchical theories of the new “race science” took work, which can be seen in the strange—and retrospectively unbelievable—discoveries of lost white tribes that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While none of these clans proved to … Continue reading The Myth of a “Lost White Tribe” That Created a Global Racial Caste System