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It is so probable that all Caucasoid people have had a common ancestor. Does The fact that most of Caucasoid people speak a Semitic or Indo-European language not suggest that there has been an ancient language sometime in the past that primitive Caucasoids spoke it and from which these groups have been derived?

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    No, it doesn't. And there is no such thing as "caucasoid" people. If you go back only a few thousand years, everyone alive now is descended from everybody alive then, provided they reproduced. That means that it is also "so probable" that all members of any group of humans picked at random also have a common ancestor. That's in addition to the fact that ancestry has absolutely nothing to do with language. Anybody with any ancestry can learn and will speak any language spoken around them when they're babies. Most people in the world are polyglots, and that's the way it's always been.
    – jlawler
    Jun 4, 2013 at 19:35
  • Do you mean Europeoid?
    – Anixx
    Jun 4, 2013 at 23:29
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    What about all the people in the Caucasus region, where a large number of language families are located which are neither Semitic nor Indo European: Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian? And to with group are you assigning the entirety of the Turkic and Finno-Ugric families?
    – hippietrail
    Jun 5, 2013 at 5:20
  • @jlawler I wonder how you can say " there is no such thing as caucasoid people". How is it possible that something seen by eyes can be denied by science! People in Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Northern India have common anatomical characteristics that is caused by common genes (not common nutrition or weather or something else) and in medicine they're referred to as Caucasoids or Europoids.
    – user2045
    Jun 5, 2013 at 9:31
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    But not in anthropology. Racial terms are quaint survivals of pre-genetic beliefs. As is the idea that language is associated with blood. (Blood is associated with genetics, but it doesn't fall into the nice neat colorcoding scheme of "caucusoid".)
    – jlawler
    Jun 5, 2013 at 14:06

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Language and genetics, as much as they tend to correlate, don't necessarily have to at all. People can, and do, frequently adopt languages that have no connection at all to their own ancestry. It may well be the case (and probably is) that something like this has happened in the case of Indo-European and Semitic.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'caucasoid' (and I'm not sure that your knowledge of human genetic history is very accurate), but certainly there are a couple of clear counterexamples for you. Basque is the most obvious - clearly not Indo-European, and indeed clearly pre-Indo-European, and yet spoken by people that are genetically very European. Sumerian and maybe Elamite might have also been counterexamples - they've since been replaced by Semitic languages (> Aramaic > Arabic in the case of Sumerian) or Indo-European languages ( > Persian in the case of Elamite), despite the fact that neither language was anything like either Semitic or Indo-European (or each other) and the fact that the people that spoke them were never 'replaced' with anyone else.

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Indo-European languages are more closely related to Altaic (including Turkic, Mongolic, Japanese, Korean), Eskimo-Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan than Semitic. The most of speakers of those language families belong to Mongoloid race. It is thus difficult to infer any relation between race and language based on this fact.

On the other hand, the speakers of, say, Chinese while belonging to Mongoloid race, speak a language which is much further from Indo-European than Semitic.

While we can more or less reliably speculate that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were Europeoid, we cannot do any conclusions of similar reliability about Eurasiatic or Nostratic.

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    That Indo-European languages are more closely related to Altaic etc is one theory, which is far from universally accepted. And the Mongoloid race is not a scientific concept. And I don't know what "Europeoid" is supposed to mean, but we cannot reliably conclude very much about the "race" of the PIE speakers.
    – Colin Fine
    Jun 5, 2013 at 17:13

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