Doctor explains how all blue eyed people descended from one single human
Everyone with blue eyes may have descended from a single person, a scientist has claimed.
Dr. Melissa Ilardo appeared on Andrew Huberman's podcast, where she opened up about the remarkable idea of where blue eyes come from.
Eye color is one of the more visible indicators of our genes, with brown eyes being the most common, by a long shot, being more than all the other colors put together.
The pigment is in our irises, the area directly around our pupils, with other colors including blue, green, hazel, and grey.
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In some rare cases, a person may even have something called heterochromia, where someone's eyes are each a different color, ranging from different shades of the same pigment all the way to very striking examples such as one blue and one brown eye.
Calling it one of her 'favourite genetic facts', she said: "Everyone with blue eyes descends from the same person."
She continued: "At one point in human history, one person had a change in their eye colour. And it's just amazing to imagine this person who had blue eyes for the first time."
Dr Ilardo went on to explain how the trait became more common 'through many generations', suggesting that this was 'probably because that was a more attractive and interesting feature in that individual'.
They went to speak about the 'F1' of blue eyes, which is not referring to racing very fast cars, but to the first individual to show a particular trait.
Scientists have examined this question, including a study at the University of Copenhagen which looked at mitochondrial DNA in blue-eyed people from countries around the world inlcuding Turkey, Jordan, and Denmark.
Professor Hans Eiberg, from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, said: "Originally, we all had brown eyes. But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch', which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes."
He added: "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA."
Of course, we are talking a very, very long time ago with this, so you wouldn't need to worry about two blue-eyed people in a relationship sharing the same great-great-greatgrandparent.
It's believed that this first blue-eyed person may have lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, and has since become a more common trait in the intervening generations, though still not like brown eyes.
Kit Roberts