Debets, Georgii
Debets, Georgii Frantsevich
Born Nov. 24 (Dec. 7). 1905, in Tomsk; died Jan. 19, 1969, in Moscow. Soviet anthropologist; doctor of biological sciences (1941), professor (1944). Vice-president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (1968).
Debets devoted his major work to the study of race, ethnic anthropology, paleoanthropology, anthropogenesis. and the anthropological makeup of the peoples of the USSR and Afghanistan, making use of material from his own expeditions. Debets collected and studied an enormous amount of anthropological material on the ancient populations of the territory of the USSR and summarized the results of his work in this field in a monograph entitled Paleoanthropology of the USSR (1948).