According to brief mentions by Herodotus and some other classical writers, the Caucones (or Kaukones) were an indigenous ("autochthonous") tribe of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), who were displaced or absorbed by the immigant Bithynians, who were a group of clans from Thrace that spoke an Indo-European language. Thracian Bithynians also expelled or subdued the Mysians, and some minor tribes, the Mariandyni alone maintaining themselves in cultural independence, in the northeast of what became Bithynia.

The Kaukones make the briefest appearance in the Iliad Book X, when the Trojan Dolon reveals the array of Trojan allies, ranged among their neighbors like a lesson in geography:

"Towards the sea lie the Carians, and Paionians of the bent bow, and the Leleges and Kaukones, and noble Pelasgians."

There are brief references in the Odyssey too.

What kind of pre-Indo-European language the illiterate Caucones spoke is a ludibrium of opposing camps of modern-day linguists, who tend to allign themselves according to their modern ethnicities.

In Greece itself, the Hellenes tended to lump all pre-Hellenic indigenes together as "Pelasgians".

The Caucones are not to be confused with the Cicones (also mentioned in the Iliad and the Odyssey) who were a Thracian tribe on the south coast of Thrace.