Shrenk, Leopold Ivanovich

Born Apr. 24 (May 6), 1826, on the estate of Khiten’, Sumy District, Kharkov Province; died Jan. 8 (20), 1894, in St. Petersburg. Russian ethnographer and naturalist. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1863). Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Petersburg (1879–94).

From 1854 to 1856, Shrenk led an expedition to the Amur River and the island of Sakhalin, where he studied the Nivkh (Giviak) and other peoples. The expedition’s findings were published in a four-volume work in German, from which the material dealing with ethnography was published in Russian as The Inhabitants of the Amur Region (vols. 1–3, 1883–1903). Shrenk introduced the term “Paleo-Asiatic” as a designation for the ancient population of Northeast Asia.