Interviewee: Mark Stoneking. Geneticist Mark Stoneking, co-author of an early mitochondrial DNA paper, talks about the competing theories of human origins. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human origins > Migrations > Videos > Fossils and human origins)

Some individuals, such as Chris Stringer, had from their own studies of the fossil record, this is completely independent of any of the genetic evidence, had also concluded that there was evidence in the fossils for a recent African origin of modern humans. However there was other paleoanthropologists, using the exact same fossil material, coming to very different conclusions, namely that, seeing evidence of what they called long term regional continuity, so specific traits that you find in modern Europeans, also finding in ancient Europeans, but nowhere else; specific traits that you find in modern Asians that you also see in ancient Asians, modern Africans that you also see in ancient Africans. Thereby concluding that those ancient populations from around the old world had contributed those traits to modern populations and thereby had contributed genes. And so this dispute was called multiregional evolution and therefore proposed that all old world populations had contributed to modern humans, as opposed to the view that Chris Stringer and other paleoanthropologists had of the fossil record namely that only a single group in Africa contributed to the diversity that we see today.

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