With the fossil record so unhelpful, scientists have turned increasingly to genetic studies, in particular the part known as mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA was only discovered in 1964, but by the 1980s some ingenious souls at the University of California at Berkeley had realized that it has two features that lend it a particular convenience as a kind of molecular clock: it is passed on only through the female line, so it doesn't become scrambled with paternal DNA with each new generation, and it mutates about twenty times faster than normal nuclear DNA, making it easier to detect and follow genetic patterns over time. By tracking the rates of mutation they could work out the genetic history and relationships of whole groups of people.

In 1987, the Berkeley team, led by the late Allan Wilson, did an analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 147 individuals and declared that the rise of anatomically modern humans occurred in Africa within the last 140,000 years and that "all present-day humans are descended from that population." It was a serious blow to the multiregionalists. But then people began to look a little more closely at the data. One of the most extraordinary points— almost too extraordinary to credit really—was that the "Africans" used in the study were actually African-Americans, whose genes had obviously been subjected to considerable mediation in the past few hundred years. Doubts also soon emerged about the assumed rates of mutations.