The Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race.
Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists have switched from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective, and have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences.
In the United States, the root term Caucasian is still in use as a synonym for white or of European, Middle Eastern, or North African ancestry, a usage that has been criticized.