German anatomist, craniologist and founder of
anthropology. Although he compared crania only by
eye, in 1790 he defined five nonhierarchical
human varieties, which he termed
Ethiopian, Malayan,
American,
Mongolian and
Caucasian; the latter was the result of the examination of a single
skull from the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea. Blumenbach was the first to create a
typology based solely on
morphology; his de-emphasis of
behavioral attributes was a departure from earlier taxonomists such as Linnaeus. A biblical monogenist, Blumenbach held that
human variation was accounted for by
degenerative adaptive responses to varied
environments, and that
variations in
skin color,
stature and
body proportions had no absolute
value, but merge gradually into one another, thus, that
classification into
human races is
arbitrary.