Professor Stoneking focuses on different aspects of human evolution. The origins of modern man and his global migration patterns are of particular interest to him. In 1987, Stoneking, his supervisor Allan Wilson and fellow researcher Rebecca L. Cann contributed to the Out of Africa theory by introducing the concept of the Mitochondrial Eve, the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living humans.

After obtaining his doctorate from the University of California in 1986, Stoneking worked as professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He then went to Munich as a guest professor before being appointed division leader of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and an honorary professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Leipzig in 1999

Professors who hold the Eugène Dubois rotating chair are appointed in two faculties, with the initial intention of delivering master classes and public lectures. Stoneking was appointed in the Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML) and the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (FHS). The topic of his first series of master classes, organised this spring by the GROW research centre, is the same as his first textbook: molecular anthropology. He will return for a second visit in September to focus on the FHS.