Joseph Iosif Egorovich Deniker

Deniker, Joseph (Iosif Egorovich) 

Born Mar. 6 (18), 1852, in Astrakhan; died Mar. 18, 1918, in Paris. French anthropologist; librarian at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris from 1888.

Deniker devised a classification system for human races (1900) in which the principle of distinguishing anthropological types purely on the basis of physical characteristics was first introduced. A serious shortcoming of this classification system is its nonhistoric approach, which makes it impossible to trace the process of the origin of races. Some principles of classification introduced by Deniker are partially used by Soviet anthropologists.

WORKS

Chelovecheskie rasy. St. Petersburg, 1902. (Translated from French.)