Blue-eyed folks, take note: it turns out that you all sprung from the same person, which will undoubtedly cause great discomfort for the other blue-eyed people you’re attempting to pull.
From one ancestor…
We know that blue eyes are a recessive gene, which means that you need to have two of them for the colour to show, from what little we learned during our Additional Science GCSE.
However, if you were curious about the precise origin of these genes, one study has discovered that they can all be linked to a single individual.
We are aware that people with blue eyes are far less common than those with brown eyes; according to Healthline, 8–10% of people worldwide have blue eyes.
Now that researchers have established that the genetic mutation originated from a single human who lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, its rarity makes sense.
Since the OCA2 gene controls the amount of brown pigment in the human eye, researchers have been attempting to determine what changed.
And how do they know that everything stems from a single ancestor? because everyone with blue eyes has the same genetic mutation.
Though much more research is needed, it’s believed that the mutation may have spread as people moved from Africa to Europe. If so, that would help explain why it appears that people of European descent primarily have blue eyes.
The mutation was first located by a research team from the University of Copenhagen in 2008, which is when the discovery was made.
The study also examined the variance in less frequent eye colours, like green, which supported the theory that the blue-eyed gene originated from a single person.
Professor Hans Eiberg, the study’s author and chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, told Science Daily that persons with green eyes can be identified by the fact that their iris has less melanin than that of people with blue eyes.
From this, he said, “we may infer that all blue-eyed people are related to the same ancestor since they have all inherited the same switch at precisely the same location in their DNA.”
So there you have it—more than we ever taught in science class—blue-eyed individuals have a common ancestor, and our green eyes are caused by less melanin in our iris.
