Joseph Deniker

Joseph Yegorovich Deniker (Russian: Иосиф Егорович Деникер, Yosif Yegorovich Deniker; 6 March 1852, in Astrakhan – 18 March 1918, in Paris) was a Russian-French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps of race in Europe.

He first studied at the university and technical institute of St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity, traveled extensively in the petroleum districts of the Caucasus, in Central Europe, Italy and Dalmatia.

[1] Deniker became one of the chief editors of the Dictionnaire de geographie universelle, and published many papers in the anthropological and zoological journals of France.

[1] In 1904 he was invited by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain to give the Huxley Memorial Lecture.

Deniker's complicated maps of European races, of which he sometimes counted upwards of twenty, were widely referenced in his day, if only to illustrate the extremes of arbitrary racial classification.