Allan Wilson, an evolutionary biochemist was born in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand in 1934. Wilson earned a BS at Otago University and in 1955 began work on his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, Wilson set up a biochemistry lab where he worked to explain the origins of the human species. Wilson devised a "molecular clock" that was determined by genetic mutations rather than the traditional use of fossils to model human origins. The molecular clock started at the time the human species diverged from a common ancestor and accounted for all of the genetic mutations that had taken place since the time of divergence.

Together with doctoral student Vince Sarich, Wilson discovered that the DNA of humans is 99 percent identical with that of chimpanzee DNA. Utilizing this information, Wilson and Sarich concluded that proto-hominids evolved five million years ago. Anthropologists of that time believed that proto-hominids had...