Allan C. Wilson, a biochemist whose provocative genetic approach to the study of evolution led to a theory that all human beings descended from a single woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago, has died at age 56. He lived in Berkeley, Calif.
He died Sunday while undergoing treatment for leukemia at the Fred Hutchinson Memorial Cancer Center in Seattle, said the University of California at Berkeley, where Dr. Wilson was a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.
In research that shook up paleoanthropology, a field defined primarily by the study of fossil bones, Dr. Wilson and his colleagues identified a
”molecular clock” for measuring human evolution. They determined that proteins and genes could change over time at a steady rate and thus act as a molecular clock.
Applying this technique, Dr. Wilson and Dr. Vincent M. Sarich, also of Berkeley, proposed in the late 1960s the now-accepted theory that apes and human beings evolved from lineages that split off from one another 5 million years ago.
A more recent application, which gave rise in 1987 to what was known popularly as the African Eve hypothesis, remains controversial.
Dr. Wilson and his colleagues based their research on the analysis of genetic material, mitochondrial DNA, that is passed only from women to their offspring.
The mitochondrion is an energy-producing organ inside every cell and contains its own complement of genes separate from the genes in the cell nucleus.
After examining mitochondrial DNA from people of various races, the scientists hypothesized that all human beings living today have mitochondria traceable to a common ancestor, a woman who was described as ”the mother of us all.”
The theory also held that her descendants, the first modern human beings, spread out of Africa 50,000 to 100,000 years ago to replace archaic human beings throughout Europe and Asia.
Many paleontologists dispute this part of the theory, contending fossil evidence indicates that modern human beings evolved from ancient ones in many different parts of the world at different times.
Dr. Wilson, who was born in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand, received a Ph.D. in biology from Berkeley in 1961 and joined its faculty in 1964. He won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1986 and was elected a member of the Royal Society of London and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
