The secret of blue eyes revealed

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

If you trace the history of mankind, it is easy to find that blue eyes were especially appreciated at all times. We must not forget about the legendary blue eyes of Frank Sinatra, thanks to his blue eyes, Paul Newman conquered millions of women's hearts, and now this tradition in Hollywood, however, already in relation to men's hearts, continues Cameron Diaz. However, the question of how and why blue eyes appeared has always remained something of a genetic mystery, but only until now.

As researchers from the University of Copenhagen found out, the vast majority of blue-eyed people (more than 99.5%) have the same mutation in the gene responsible for the color of the iris. They all inherited the same change in the same place in their DNA. According to the head of the study, Professor Hans Eiberg, this means that all our blue-eyed contemporaries had one ancestor.

Scientists even managed to establish that the "ancestor of the blue-eyed" lived about ten thousand years ago on the Black Sea coast.

For his research, Professor Eiberg recruited almost 800 blue-eyed people of a wide variety of nationalities - from blond Scandinavians to citizens of Turkey and Jordan. Scientists cannot yet determine the exact time when the aforementioned mutation occurred. But it is known that this happened during the period when Europe was settled by immigrants from the Middle East. Most likely, experts believe, the birthplace of the mutated OCA2 gene was the northwestern part of the Black Sea region.

Eyberg explained that brown eye color is caused by the dark pigment melanin. However, it was in Northern Europe that a gene malfunction occurred that disrupted the production of melanin, which led to the appearance of blue-eyed people. If men and women with this eye color have an almost identical genetic sequence of that part of DNA that is responsible for eye color, then the owners of brown eyes, on the contrary, have quite a lot of individual variations in these genes.