The underlying theme of the first phase of his university teaching career was his notorious dedication to the teaching, research and dissemination of anthropology, a field of knowledge introduced by him into the University of Porto curriculum. He always sought to enhance and empower the field, establishing new perspectives for teaching and research, which, up the 1920s, was mostly focused on Criminal Anthropology and a general social agenda. Within the Faculty of Sciences of Porto, he founded and fostered the Anthropology Scientific Research Institute (1923) and the Anthropological Laboratory and Museum (1927), securing the field’s programme of studies and the formation of a new scientific elite in search of its scientific guidance.

Mendes Corrêa built international acclaim as an anthropologist since the 1920s. His view of anthropology was based on the importance of the natural history of man, with man's biological and psychological individuality involved in the collective construction of races, cultures and human societies. He was committed to the essential search for an interdisciplinary approach with other sciences such as ethnology, criminology, psychology, archaeology and prehistory, also outlined in his research and studies with significant input. Along this scientific line of developing the social sciences, he continued to earn cultural and scientific awards from organisations such as the Carlos Ribeiro Society, the Martins Sarmento Society and the magazine Portugalia, becoming one of the most active builders of the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (1918), an organisation that still exists today, which promotes collaboration across different branches of science, in a globalising perspective of human knowledge.

At the age of 33, Mendes Corrêa set himself apart from his peers in the historical community with the publication of Homo: os modernos estudos sobre a origem do homem (Homo: Modern Studies on the Origin of Man), an anthropological research study based on archaeological and pre-historical hypotheses. Due to the revolutionary theory it proposed, it was translated into several languages. In examining the origins of man and the migration of the first human communities, in a clearly reaffirmed view of evolutionism and monogenesis, he defended the predominance of Homo sapiens in the evolutionary process and pointed to a Cradle of Humankind in the Indian Ocean basin, even proposing the hypothesis of a possible South American settlement through Oceania due to the ethnic, linguistic and ethnological similarities between their indigenous tribes.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | (Pdf)