Stephen Oppenheimer

In his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998, Oppenheimer makes a case that the rise in ocean levels that accompanied the waning of the ice age—as much as 500 feet (150 m)—during the period 14,000–7,000 years ago, must be taken into account when trying to understand the flow of genes and culture in Eurasia. Citing evidence from geology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and folklore, he hypothesizes that the Southeast Asian subcontinent of Sundaland was home to a rich and original culture that was dispersed when Sundaland was mostly submerged and its population moved westward. According to Oppenheimer, Sundaland's culture may have reached India and Mesopotamia, becoming the root for the innovative cultures that developed in those areas. He also suggests that the Austronesian languages originate from Sundaland and that a Neolithic Revolution may have started there.[2]

In 2002, Oppenheimer worked as consultant on a television documentary series, The Real Eve, produced by the American cable TV network the Discovery Channel and directed by Andrew Piddington. The series was known as Where We Came From in the United Kingdom. The "Eve" in the title refers to Mitochondrial Eve, a name used for the most recent common ancestor of all humans in the matrilineal (mother to daughter) line of descent.

Following the series, Oppenheimer published a book on the same theme, originally titled Out of Eden in the UK and republished as The Real Eve in the US. This work, published in 2004, focuses on Oppenheimer's hypothesis: that approximately 85 thousand years ago, a group of modern humans migrated from East Africa across the Red Sea to South Asia in a single major exodus numbering no more than a few hundred individuals. This lone group of wanderers, he suggests, were the ancestors of all the peoples of the earth except sub-Saharan Africans, their descendants having since migrated all over the Eurasian continent, North Africa, the Pacific islands, and the New World, and radiated into a plurality of physical characteristics, languages, ethnicities and cultures as seen today.[3]

In his 2006 book The Origins of the British (revised in 2007), Oppenheimer argued that neither Anglo-Saxons nor Celts had much impact on the genetics of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and that British ancestry mainly traces back to the Palaeolithic Iberian people, now represented best by Basques, instead. He also argued that the Scandinavian input has been underestimated. He published an introduction to his book in Prospect magazine[4] and answered some of his critics in a further Prospect magazine article in June 2007.[5]

Although Basque-like Neolithic farmers did populate Britain (and much of Northern Europe) during the Neolithic period, upwards of 90% of their DNA was overturned by a North European population of ultimate Russian Steppe origin as part of an ongoing migration process that brought large amounts of Steppe DNA (including the R1b haplogroup) to North and West Europe.[6] Modern autosomal genetic clustering is testament to this fact, as the British and Irish cluster genetically very closely with other North European populations, not Iberians, Galicians, Basques or those from the south of France.[7][8]