Abstract

Although the legacy of the Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann has left profound traces in the formation of modern evolutionary anthropology and comparative neuroscience, few if any studies have considered the wider context of his comparative research and its potential modern significance. At the same time, current findings and directions seem to offer new tools for this purpose, and doing so may open exciting perspectives in the interpretation of human evolution and neurobiology from developmental viewpoints, as sought by Portmann. Specifically, his bio-anthropological research program, or basal anthropology, challenges established fault-lines between structural and functional research traditions, and seeks new contacts between them through typological generalizations that draw on the distinct developmental patterns of altricial and precocial species – and humans, as a secondarily altricial species. The concept of secondarily evolved altriciality may significantly clarify contested issues of neurological, comparative biological, and anthropological research, by recognizing the wide zoological background upon which the human type of ontogeny can be seen as a distinct class among all vertebrates, including higher mammals and primates. By these means, the more abstract concepts of a socially open and symbolically constituted life mode, as discussed in early anthropology, can be integrated with modern frameworks, where a close dialogue is reemerging between developmental and evolutionary, as well as structural and functional research traditions.