[2] His research showed neuronal migration, i.e. the origin of the neocortical neurons from a zone of dividing cells lining the ventricles of the fetal brain and migration from the ventricular zone to the outside cortex along special guides known as the radial glia.
As an independent investigator at MIT, his results were largely ignored, by his account, in favor of Pasko Rakic's findings that neurogenesis is limited to pre-natal development.
The fact that the mammalian brain can create new neurons even into adulthood was rediscovered by Elizabeth Gould in 1999,[6] leading it to be one of the hottest fields in neuroscience.
Adult neurogenesis has recently been proven to occur in the dentate gyrus, olfactory bulb and striatum through the measurement of Carbon-14—the levels of which changed during nuclear bomb testing throughout the 20th century—in postmortem human brains.
[7] Altman conducted a careful analysis of the brain evolution through his comparison of nervous systems of several species.