If you've blue eyes, research suggests you share unbelievable connection with all blue-eyed people on Earth
People with blue eyes contribute to a rare category in the population on Earth. This group, sometimes, also exhibits similar personalities or traits on an insignificant scale. Turns out, there’s a logical explanation for this, according to Science Daily. A study discovered that people who have blue eyes share a connection that goes back 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. The research reveals that these people are not just connected because of their eye color but are more related than you would think. The study conducted by the University of Copenhagen highlighted that a mutation is the reason blue-eyed people exist among us.
"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. He added that it was all science that led to the “turning off” of brown eyes and gave birth to a new gene. “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,” Eiberg explained. This gene is responsible for the production of melanin which gives our eyes, hair and other parts of the body the color. The eye color is mainly decided by the amount of melanin in the iris, per Open Access Government.
However, here’s the baffling part. The gene hasn’t completely switched off. It’s more reduced which has caused the color of the eyes to become dull, eventually resulting in a blue-ish iris. While brown to green is a more plausible theory, even blue eyes, in a small variation, contain melanin. Dr. Gary Heiting, an optometrist who wrote an article for All About Vision, noted that hazel or blue eyes don’t really have pigments of their own and are determined by the amount of melanin. "From this, we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," the professor noted. He added, “They have all inherited the same switch at the same spot in their DNA."
Describing it as the “shuffling of the human genome,” Eiberg remarked that it is a natural process. Several researchers have concluded that blue-eyed people are a result of this mutation, per Popular Mechanics. The latter first took place in Europe thousands of years ago and eventually spread throughout. Moreover, there’s only around 10% of the human population with blue eyes, the majority being in Scandinavian countries.
Another factor in determining blue eyes is the role of light. The way light falls on the eyes and the colors that reflect also tend to show a change in the eye colors. “It’s an interaction between the amount of melanin and the architecture of the iris itself. It’s a very complex architecture,” Heiting mentioned, per CNN. An added noteworthy bit pointed out was that the melanin levels so deeply impact eye colors that sometimes babies with blue eyes tend to develop a change in their eye color as they grow. This is due to the added adult level of melanin that comes over the years, changing the color from blue to a darker pigment— green or brown.