All People with Blue Eyes Share a Common Ancestor
You probably know a number of people who have blue eyes (and you may possess them yourself), but just about 10,000 years ago, blue-eyed folks were unheard of. For a long time, all humans had brown eyes, until one northern European with a genetic mutation brought a whole new look to the human eyeball. To this day, every blue-eyed person is a descendant of that first azure-eyed person. Eye color, similar to skin color, comes down to the amount of melanin, or pigment, found in the iris. More melanin results in darker eyes, while eyes that lack melanin in the first layer of the iris appear blue instead of brown. In other words, blue eyes are not blue because they have blue pigment; they are blue because they lack brown pigment. How did this happen? In 2008, researchers at the University of Copenhagen discovered that people with blue eyes possess a genetic mutation that essentially "turns off" the eyes’ ability to create melanin. This mutation affects the ...
