Joseph Deniker

Joseph Deniker (1852–1918) was a French anthropologist and naturalist, born at Astrakhan in Russia to French parents. Trained as a chemical engineer, he traveled widely before settling in Paris, where he took a doctorate in natural science with a study of anthropoid apes and from 1888 was chief librarian of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. The Races of Man (1900), published in English and French, set out his classification of human populations, including a scheme of European races that introduced the term Nordic. He also wrote on the peoples of Russia and Central Asia and on the botany of the Caucasus.