Sunday Feature: Caucasian Roots

The second of two programmes in which historian Bettany Hughes traces the role of the Caucasus in western imagination, from Jason and the Argonauts through to the idea of a primeval white Caucasian race. 2. Bettany traces how an anthropologist invented the idea that this region was the home of the white race referred to as 'the Caucasians'. She also finds how in the writings of Pushkin and Tolstoy it became a Russian version of the Wild West.