Have you ever wondered where our eye color comes from?
Many people might assume the blue in some people’s eyes developed over time from the reflection from the sky or water. But the truth is a lot more interesting…
The team of researchers from Copenhagen university have found that a single mutation has caused the phenomenon of blue eyes. Every single blue eyed person are genetically related to 1 person who lived in the black sea region between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
This gene called OCA2 really started to be noticed about 8,000 years ago. Dr. Hans Eiberg claims that before this time, every person had brown eyes. This gene created a switch in our genetics which shifted the ability to produce brown eyes and started producing blue tinted iris’s.
Almost 95% of Europeans in Scandinavian countries all share the color blue in their eyes. The color blue in our eyes is as recent as Europe itself. The question many scientists are asking is why and how exactly did we go from no one having blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 to 40% of Europeans having blue eyes now?
Have you ever noticed that most babies are born with bright blue eyes that sometimes change over time? I was born with blue eyes and now I have hazel colored eyes.
This is because they are not born with the amount of melanin that they will eventually have and it develops over time. Is the amount of melanin in us that creates the pigment in our skin and irises.
“Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn’t fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot,” Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.
“From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” Eiberg said. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.”
So the real question here is, who exactly was that one blue eyed person that millions of people stemmed from?