Human morphology at Lomonosov Moscow State University at the beginning of the third millennium: present and future prospects

The article discusses the main directions, achievements and future prospects for the development of Human morphology at Lomonosov Moscow State University at the beginning of the third millennium. The development of a morphological typology of physique for children and adults by V.E. Deryabin can be regarded as one of the great achievements of Russian morphological research. Deryabin’s typology has become widespread and takes a leading place in Russian anthropological studies of intra- and intergroup features of physique in modern populations. Anthropologists of Lomonosov Moscow State University have obtained new data on the main directions of the secular trend (intergenerational changes) in the body sizes of Moscow youth over the past 50 years. Modern trends in changes of physique in the early twenty-first century include the continued increase in body weight and fat deposition (with differentrates in young males and females), a slight decrease of massiveness of the skeleton common to both sexes, and the tendency to increase andromorphism (masculinity) of physique in girls. A new contribution to the development of modern Human morphology could be the construction of predictive models of the microevolutionary transformations of the human physique in the third millennium based on fluctuating changes in socio-economic, demographic and socio-cultural factors. One of the actual practical tasks of Sports morphology is to identify anthropometric markers of sports success in various specializations for using at different stages of sports selection and correction of training process. Implementation of new digital technologies – 3D body scanners – into the practice of morphological research will allow storing information as digital copies of the human body and get a wide range of body composition indicators for different groups of the modern population. © 2024. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license