Mikhail Fyodorovich Nesturch

Mikhail Fjodorowitsch Nesturch ( Russian Михаи́л Фёдорович Не́стурх ; * 11 February ^July / 23 February  1895 ^greg. In Pskov , Russian Empire ; † 1979 in Moscow ) was a Soviet anthropologist , primate researcher and author.

Life

Mikhail Nesturch's parents Fyodor Pawlowitsch Nesturch and Marija Emiljewna Termen were of Jewish origin. The father worked as an architect . After the family moved to Odessa in 1900, the young Mikhail went to a high school. After graduating, he studied mathematics and physics at the Imperatorsky Novorossiski University (today - National II Mechnikov University ) in Odessa. He graduated in 1916. As a result, Nesturch was drafted into the army, where he took artillery courses. After the First World War he was made a lieutenant in the artillery, but then worked as a lecturer in political education for the provincial military commissariat of his city. In the early twentieth years, Mikhail Nesturch moved from Odessa to Moscow. There he also studied anthropology at Moscow State University. From 1928 he worked in research institutes for anthropology. Nesturch's main works deal with economics , systematics, the paleontology of primates, the theory of human descent and the development of human phenotypes . Like most Soviet anthropologists at the time, the researcher was an advocate of monogenism and also assumed that modern mankind with all its races had the Neanderthals as an ancestor. Nesturch divided the type groups of the modern man into three main races: Negrid-Australide, Europide and Mongolide. Additional phenotypes were assigned to all of these, for example to the Europids: Southern European type groups: Indo-Pamir, Near East, Mediterranean-Balkan. Northern European type groups: Atlantic-Baltic, White Sea-Baltic. He saw the so-called Eastern European and Atlanto-Black Sea races as contact types among the Europeans.

In 1962 he attained the rank of doctor of biological sciences, in 1967 finally that of professor.

Publications

• Человек и его предки, М., 1934; ( dt . man and his ancestors)
• Человеческие расы, М., 1965; (German human races)
• Происхождение человека, М., 1970; (dt. The descent of humans)
• Приматология и антропогенез, М., 1960. (German primatology and anthropogeny )

The following were published in German:

• Anthropologie, Michail F. Nesturch by G. Fischer, Urania-Verlag (1954)
• Human races, MF Nesturch and CH Ludwig von Urania (January 1, 1960)
• The descent of man, Michail F. Nesturch from Leipzig / Jena / Berlin: Urania-Verlag, (1961)