Capoid is one of the races in one classification which divides living humans into five lineage groups, Australoid, Capoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. It is now present only in Southern Africa, as the Khoi and San peoples, and as part of the ancestry of the more populous Xhosa people and others in the region, though the presence of the Khoisan languages Hadza and Sandawe farther north, and possibly fossil evidence, suggest a Capoid presence in East Africa which was later absorbed by the Bantu expansion.

The term Capoid and the five-race classification implies a judgement that they are sufficiently distinct from Negroids to warrant a separate top-level category. This was originally made on the basis of visible physical features, but more recently genetic studies have shown the Khoisan to be distinct from all other peoples in some genetic markers; there is also a high level of diversity between different Khoisan groups, indicating they separated long ago.

Recently, it has been suggested that the first anatomically modern humans to migrate out of Africa and give rise to modern humans in the rest of the world were similar to the Khoisan. While some genetic markers shared between Khoisan, Ethiopians and non-Africans can be interpreted as supporting this hypothesis, it is anachronistic to identify a modern race with any tens of thousands of years ago.

See also

• Race

• Single-origin hypothesis#African Evidence of "Modern" Humans

Race (historical definitions) | Ras Khoisan

External links

• Picture of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, Capoid, Australoid side by side. (Site is geocities and its bandwidth transfer frequently runs out, so if the pictures are acceptable please add them to wikipedia)