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Negroid is an adjective derived from the term Negro and refers to a presumed race of people mostly from sub-Saharan Africa.^[1] The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859.^[2] In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of humankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa",^[3] and is commonly associated with outdated notions of racial typology which have been widely discredited in scientific circles^[1] — for modern usage it is generally associated with outdated racial notions, and is discouraged, as it is potentially offensive.^[3]

Though the term Negroid is still used in certain disciplines such as craniometry and epidemiology, its usage is in decline.^{[citation needed]} Even in a medical context, some scholars have recommended that the term Negroid should be avoided in scientific writings because of its association with racism and race science.^[4] This mirrors the decline in usage of the term Negro, which fell out of favor following the campaigns of the American civil rights movement — the term Negro became associated with periods of legalized discrimination, and was rejected by African Americans during the 1960s for Black.^[3]

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In physical anthropology the term was one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans were divisible into sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristic such as skeletal morphology. Later extensions, such as Carleton S. Coon's "Origin of Races" placed this theory in an evolutionary context — Coon divided the species homo sapiens into five groups, Caucasoid, Capoid, Congoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid, based on his belief of their date of evolution from homo erectus.^[5][6] Labeling Congoids the "African Negroes" or "Pygmies", he divided indigenous Africans into two distinct groups based on their date of origin, and loosened classification from mere appearance — however, this lead to disagreement between approaches to dating divergence, and consequent conflicting results.^[6][7]

These theories were quickly criticized on the basis that such "sorting criteria" do not (in general) produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames.^[8] As Monatagu (1963) said,

Today, most scientists view human variation as distributed clinally, often without any sharp discontinuities. While acknowledging the existence of human variation, anthropologists have abandoned the view that discrete racial entities exist, since there is considerable overlap in characteristics between the populations.^[9] Furthermore most of the variation in physical traits is found between individuals within the so-called racial groups.^[10]

In modern craniofacial anthropometry Negroid describes certain stereotypical features associated with skull types of people indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. This classification system was primarily used in the racial determination of skeletal remains in the United States. However, even this system of classification has been criticized for only working in the situations such as the United States, where the populations are derived from geographically distant locations. For example, a recent study of ancient Nubian crania concluded:

• -oid
• Africoid
• Race (historical definitions)