Steiner's reading of evolution in which the human form is the elder: animals branched off later and never carried the spine-into-skull metamorphosis to completion.
Man Older Than the Animals in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's inversion of the familiar evolutionary sequence, stated in his lecture on organic natural science and medicine of 6 April 1921 in Dornach (GA 76, The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences). Read imaginatively, the human head is a metamorphosis of an earlier spine-like organization: skull and brain are transformed vertebrae and spinal cord, so the more perfected organ is the earlier one. On this reading the human line of form is the older stream of evolution. Animals originated later, and in the shorter time available to them they reached only what appears in the human being as the later spinal formation; they lacked the time to carry that organization through the skull metamorphosis. The claim concerns the history of form working in the physical body, not a fossil pedigree, and its nearest modern relative is heterochrony research from Louis Bolk to Stephen Jay Gould.
Man Older Than the Animals names one of Steiner's boldest reversals. Where Ernst Haeckel drew the human being at the crown of an animal family tree, Steiner read the same anatomical facts in the opposite direction: the head is a metamorphosed spine, the more perfect organ is the earlier one, and the animal kingdom is a younger branching that never completed the transformation the human form carries in its skull.
In Steiner's Own Words
If, however, we consider these latter forces, then they are the same forces that we encounter, for example, in the animal kingdom, where skull formation is a process that exhibits only a lesser transformation compared to the spinal column than in humans. So we have to say: what is present in the human head points us back to older times as the earliest formation than what then already occurred as a human being with the dorsal spine, and also than what is present in the animal kingdom. In evolution, we do not have to derive man from the animal kingdom, but we have to say that an interpretation of the facts themselves shows us that man is an older being than animals, that animals originated later.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern relative of this reversal is the fetalization theory of Louis Bolk. In 1926 the Dutch anatomist, professor at the University of Amsterdam, published Das Problem der Menschwerdung, arguing that the human body is a primate fetus that has become sexually mature: the flat face, the domed skull, the sparse body hair, and the central position of the foramen magnum are conditions apes pass through before birth and then abandon, while the human being keeps them for a lifetime. Where textbook phylogeny makes the human form the newest model, Bolk made it the conserved original from which the specialized animal forms depart. Stephen Jay Gould gave the theory its modern hearing in Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard, 1977), discarding Bolk's hormonal mechanism while keeping the finding that human evolution runs on retained youth. The Belgian scientist Jos Verhulst carried the argument toward Steiner in Developmental Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates (Adonis Press, 2003), reading Bolk's data as evidence that animal forms are early crystallizations out of a stream the human form kept open. Thalira synthesis: what Bolk measured in tissue, Steiner read in time; the retained fetal form and the man older than the animals are one gesture, the human being not as the last of the animals but as the stream the animals stepped out of.
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