Citation | Stringer is distinguished for his central role in developing and testing the "Out of Africa" model for modern human origins. He also pioneered the application to palaeoanthropology of multivariate and cladistic analyses, and new physical dating techniques. From fossil evidence, he showed that Neanderthals evolved as a distinct lineage in Europe over a time period of several hundred thousand years. Morphological characters justify Homo neanderthalensis as a distinct species. Stringer demonstrated the Neanderthals represent unlikely ancestors for modern humans, and successfully championed the evolutionary sequence leading to Homo sapiens reconstructed from African fossils over the same time period. |