In Steiner's evolutionary reading, only the human head descends from the animal kingdom; the thorax and limbs were added later out of earth forces.
The Human Head as Animal Inheritance in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's correction of Darwinism, stated in the lecture World Development in the Light of Anthroposophy (Christiania, 1 December 1921, published in The Reality of the Higher Worlds, GA 79). Steiner accepts descent, but restricts it: the whole human being cannot be placed at the summit of the animal series. Only the human head descends from the animal kingdom. Its upper and lower jaws are shrivelled, transformed limbs, and every animal form reappears in it at a higher stage. The thorax and limbs were added later, formed out of the earth's own forces, so that the body carries the head the way a coach carries a passenger, lifting it free of gravity. Anthroposophy therefore reads human evolution backward: the head is the oldest inheritance, and the animals began their development after man had already begun his. Comparative anatomy still traces jaws and ear bones to ancestral gill arches, an unexpected echo of this claim.
The Human Head as Animal Inheritance names the strangest turn in Steiner's evolutionary teaching. Where Darwinism sets the whole human being at the top of the animal chain, Steiner finds only the head there. Embryology hints at it: everything is at first head, and the limbs emerge from stunted organs. What we call our most perfect part is, paradoxically, our animal part, raised to a higher stage.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is not possible to range the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us to-day, is a descendant of the whole animal species. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal-chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human beings. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part, is a transformation from the animal kingdom.
What it Means Today
Comparative anatomy has, without intending it, kept circling Steiner's claim. In Your Inner Fish (2008), the University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin, co-discoverer of the Devonian fossil fish Tiktaalik roseae in 2004, traces the deepest ancestry in the human body not through the limbs but through the head. The jaw skeleton descends from the first gill arch of ancient fish. The malleus and incus of the middle ear are reworked reptilian jaw bones, a lineage the German anatomist Karl Reichert first proposed in 1837. Even the tangle of cranial nerves only makes sense, Shubin shows, as the rewiring of a fish's gill plumbing.
In mainstream biology this proves common descent. Steiner read the same anatomical facts in the opposite direction: for him the head is precisely the part where the animal past survives in us, transformed and raised, while thorax and limbs are the younger, more human addition, formed from the earth's forces. The two accounts disagree about everything except the anatomy itself: the head carries the animal inheritance. Thalira synthesis: what Shubin reads forward as fish becoming man, Steiner reads backward as man releasing the animal kingdom from himself, and the head is where both stories are written in the same bones.
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