Mark Stoneking


Mark Stoneking is a geneticist currently working as the Group Leader of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, of Max Planck Gesellschaft at Leipzig, and Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. He works in the field of human evolution, especially the genetic evolution, origin and dispersal of modern humans. He, along with his doctoral advisor Allan Wilson and a fellow researcher Rebecca L. Cann, contributed to the Out of Africa Theory in 1987 by introducing the concept of Mitochondrial Eve, a hypothetical common mother of all living humans based on mitochondrial DNA.

Education

Stoneking studied an undergraduate course in anthropology from 1974 at the University of Oregon, United States, from where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977. He shifted to the Pennsylvania State University to obtain MS in genetics in 1979, and subsequently a similar master's degree from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1981. His master's degree was on evolutionary genetics of salmonid fish. Captivated by the emerging research on mitochondrial DNA, in 1981 he joined Allan Wilson, a renowned biochemist at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California, Berkeley, under whose supervision he got a PhD in 1986. His research was on human mtDNA variation, a follow-up of the work of Rebecca Cann, who was just completing her doctoral thesis from the same supervisor. He continued as Postdoctoral Fellow in 1986 at Berkeley and completed it in 1988.

Professional career and contributions

In 1989, he joined the Human Genome Center at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, as a Staff Scientist. Then he worked as an Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Human Genetics, Cetus Corporation, Emeryville, California for a year. In 1990, he entered the faculty of Assistant Professor the Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University as Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994 and a full professor in 1998. During 1996-1997 he served as a Visiting Professor at the Zoology Institute, University of Munich, Germany. In 1999, he got an appointment in the Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, as the Group Leader. He concurrently serves as an Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Leipzig.

He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Evolution, Human Biology, BioEssays, Anthropological Science,, Evolutionary Biology, BMC Genetics, Gene, Investigative Genetics, EMBO Reports, and Language Dynamics and Change. He is also Senior Editor of the Annals of Human Genetics from 2008 to present. He has been in the Technical Working Group, DNA Analysis Methods of FBI between 1993 and 1998, Defense Science Board Task Force on DNA Technology for Identification of Ancient Remains, Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeology Panel, Steering Committee for National Energy Research Council Program on Environmental Factors and the Chronology of Human Evolution and Dispersal . He is also a member of the Advisory Committee, The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 2008; Advisory Board, US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center since 2011; and Chair, Scientific Advisory Committee of the Program on Forensics and Ethnicity, Philippine Genome Center, since 2011.

Legacy

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

Awards and honours

Stoneking has appeared in