ABSTRACT
As in many European countries, the history of physical anthropology in Ukraine began in the second half of the 18th century when the first works about the physical features of the local population were published. From the very beginning, physical anthropology was integrated with palaeoanthropology and ethno-historical anthropology. The earliest pages of the history of Ukrainian anthropology were connected with Professor M. Maksymovych, the first Rector of Kiev University, who published a paper on the question of human origin in 1831. Further contribution to physical anthropology in Ukraine was made by P. Chubynsky, who was awarded the golden medal in Paris after he published, between 1872 and 1879, seven volumes on the different local groups including physical anthropological data. An important scholar in the foundation and development of Ukrainian physical and ethnic
anthropology was Hvedir Vovk (Fedor Volkov, 1847-1918), a prominent representative of European science who emigrated from Ukraine to France because of his political democratic views. Vovk successfully defended his dissertation, ‘The skeletal changes of the foot in primates and human races’, at the University of Sorbonne in 1905 and was awarded the great medal of P. Broca and the annual prize of E. Goddard. While in France, Vovk, with the support of his French colleagues, managed to organize anthropological research with Ukrainian material. He continued his researches at St Petersburg University, and his analyses resulted in his fundamental works on the physical characteristic of different groups among the Ukrainian population (Vovk 1908; Volkov 1916). In Soviet time his works were forbidden, but in the post-Soviet period they received their due recognition. In the 1920s and 1930s, followers of Vovk’s ideas (O. Alesho, M. Rudnitsky, I. Rakivsky and
S. Rudenko) founded anthropological scientific societies at the universities of Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv. These universities began to accumulate skeletal collections. At this time Ukrainian anthropology made progress, but its normal development was restricted by Stalin’s purges with regard to anthropological research. After the Second World War, no anthropological centres remained in Ukraine, since some scholars were killed during the war or died in Stalin’s camps, some ceased their research in order to avoid prosecution, and others emigrated to the West.
