Mitochondrial Eve Stoneking came to prominence both in the academic and media circles with his work on mitochondrial DNA variation among different human populations. He started under the supervision of Allan Wilson and following the pioneering work of his senior graduate student, Rebecca Cann. Cann had collected data from different human populations, including those of
Asians,
Africans, and
Europeans. Then Stoneking added data from
aboriginal Australians and
New Guineans. In 1987, after a year of pending, their paper was published in
Nature in which their findings indicated that all living humans were descended through a single mother, who lived ~200,000 years ago in
Africa. The common hypothetical mother is dubbed
Mitochondrial Eve, and the concept directly implies
recent African origin of modern humans, hence, the underpinning of the so-called "Recent Out of Africa" theory. In spite of criticisms, and religious antagonisms, even after two decades he still holds this view to be as valid as any
scientific theory since a number independent research also corroborates their original human mtDNA
phylogenetic tree.
Other aspects of human evolution :
Origin of clothing and lice. Stoneking and his team announced an interesting discovery in 2003 on the evolution of
lice, and its relation to the origin of wearing cloth. Their comparison of two mtDNA and two
nuclear DNA from human
head lice and
body lice, along with a
chimpanzee louse revealed that human started to wear clothes some 72,000 years ago (give or take 42,000 years). This could be inferred because the age is when the body lice evolved from the head lice according to the molecular clock. :
Human hair. Stoneking has also pioneered the genetic basis of different hair colours and
baldness in men. His team had found that human
androgen receptor gene is the major factor associated with baldness in men. They also identified tyrosinase-related protein 1 (
TYRP1) as a major determinant of blond hair among the
Melanesians of
Solomon Islands. :
Culture as a factor of human evolution. Stoneking believes that culture has a massive influence on human evolution, and may actually increase the rate of human evolution. He argues that cultural differences are a major signal of
selection in
genomes, which have been accumulating recently and indicate that humans continue to evolve. ==Awards and honours==