The main stages of life and creativity of George Debets

Georgii (George) F. Debets is one of the greatest Soviet / Russian physical anthropologists of the XX century. He was born on December 7, 1905 in Tomsk. In 1922 he entered the History Department of the Irkutsk University, in 1927 he entered the graduate school of the Institute of Anthropology of the Moscow State University, where he worked for 15 years. The scientific activity of Georgii F. Debets as an anthropologist began with paleoanthropological researches. His first publication was devoted to the Neolithic skulls from the territory of the Baikal region. Then he studied the skeletal remains from archaeological sites of many regions. In 1938 he received the candidate of biological sciences degree. From the first years in the Institute of Anthropology of Moscow State University he thought about the "summary of paleoanthropology of the USSR". In a short time a huge material reflected all the stages of the history of human racial types in the territory of the Soviet Union was assembled by the efforts of one person. The research program has been carefully elaborated and analyzed with relation to differentiating value of each attribute. The result of this work was the monograph "Paleoanthropology of the USSR" (1948). This work marked the creation of a new branch in the Russian science - anthropology of the ancient population. Georgii F. Debets paid a considerable attention to theoretical aspects of Evolutionary Anthropology, in particular, the problem of human homeland. He was a supporter of the polycentric theory of Homo sapiens origin. He was the first who studied the child's skeleton from Teshik-Tash cave and showed his Neanderthal affiliation. Georgii F. Debets attended to the problem of changes of the physical type of man in time. The problem of factors of these changes was the most important question of paleoanthropology for him. The Northeast expedition of Georgii F. Debets to Kamchatka is absolutely unique, where during the 1945-1948 he alone assembled entirely unique material on the physical characteristics of the indigenous population of the Far East. G. F. Debets made a huge contribution to the study of Eskimos craniology and the development of many of the fundamental issues related to the Arctic race. G.F. Debets dedicated a lot of time to the improvement and harmonization of methods and cranial research program. In his later years he drew his attention to the paleosomatology problem, he developed formulas for the body length reconstruction and other attributes of fossil populations' constitution. The death of Georgii F. Debets in 1969 was unfairly untimely.

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