Traditionally scholars writing on the disciplinary history of British anthropology have canonised 1871 as the beginning of a new era for the research field. Two important texts were published in this year: Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man and Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Scholars have since argued that evolutionary frameworks came to redefine the theoretical landscape of anthropology in 1871 – referring to this period as the evolutionary turn. However, in making this point, that evolution became a new preoccupation for British anthropologists, the secondary literature has underemphasised the importance of other developmental theories in the human sciences during the decades before the 1870s. The introduction of evolution within the race sciences repositioned and expanded the earlier developmental models of researchers interested in human variation. With these considerations in mind, this paper examines the significance of developmental processes in the works of early nineteenth-century practitioners from James Cowles Prichard in the 1810s to Francis Galton in the 1860s. It also discusses some of the opposition to evolutionary and developmental writings during the middle of the nineteenth century.