A big advantage to blue eyes is that research shows they might be linked to a lower risk of developing cataracts. Cataracts are clouding of the eye's lens. According to some studies, blue eyes may have evolved because these individuals were able to cope better with seasonal affective disorders.
Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body's ability to make brown pigment in your peepers. Researchers have finally located the mutation that causes blue eyes, and the findings suggest that all blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago.
New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. Scientists have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6,000-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
Homo sapiens (modern humans) emerged around 200,000 years ago in Africa, but the mutation that causes blue eyes did not appear until sometime around 10,000 years ago.
Scientists concluded that every blue-eyed person on the world today can trace their ancestry back to a single European who probably lived about 10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region and who first developed a specific mutation that accounts for the now widespread iris coloration.
22, 2020, 8:05 a.m. It turns out most Vikings weren't as fair-haired and blue-eyed as legend and pop culture have led people to believe. According to a new study on the DNA of over 400 Viking remains, most Vikings had dark hair and dark eyes.
There's also the idea that blue eyes were advantageous because they perceive stationary objects better than moving things. This could have been an advantage to hunter gatherer women who needed to identify and collect plant foods — indeed blue eyes may even have evolved in women first.
A report from the University of St. Andrews, published this week in Evolution and Human Behavior, says north European women evolved blond hair and blue eyes to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males, the Sunday Times of London reported.
A Stone Age man who lived about 7,000 years ago and whose buried bones were discovered in 2006 has turned out to be the earliest known person with blue eyes, a physical trait that evolved relatively recently in human history, a study has found.
Are blue-eyed humans going the way of the dodo? Well, no. We cleared up that rumor about redheads going extinct; the same goes for blue eyes. While the trait is becoming more rare, it's unlikely it will disappear all together.
Additionally, there is evidence that blue eyes evolved before light skin. Sturm and his team did a study looking at the genetic information extracted from a 7000-year-old tooth belonging to a hunter-gatherer dubbed La Brana 1, unearthed from the northwestern Spain.
Blue eyes are rare, making up just 8-10% of the world's population. Blue eyes are caused by a relative lack of melanin in the iris. Just like your skin and hair, how much melanin you have determines your eye color. All eyes are technically brown because melanin itself is brown.
blue eyes descend from a single genetic mutation means that every single person on the planet with blue eyes descended from one common ancestor. In fact, a team of geneticists at the University of Copenhagen actually traced that mutation all the way back to a single Danish family.
The color of babies' irises actually depends on melanin, a protein secreted by special cells called melanocytes that also give your baby's skin its color. Babies whose heritage is dark-skinned are usually born with brown eyes, whereas Caucasian newborns tend to be born with blue or gray eyes.
Melanin is the dark pigment occurring in the hair and the iris of the eye. Melanin is responsible for tanning, freckling, and changing of hair and eye color. Caucasian babies are born with hardly any melanin, resulting in light blue eyes and cream-colored skin.
In mythology, blondes' first appearance was 11,000 years ago with two of the Norse, or Scandinavian, goddesses, Sif and Freyja. Freyja was the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility. With blonde hair and blue eyes, she was one of the most admired goddesses for her beauty.
Naturally-occurring blond hair is primarily found in people living in or descended from people who lived in the northern half of Europe, and may have evolved alongside the development of light skin that enables more efficient synthesis of vitamin D, due to northern Europe's lower levels of sunlight.
The allele genes come in the form of brown, blue, or green, with brown being dominant, followed by green, and blue being the least dominant or what is called recessive. Given this information, you can determine what eye colors are dominant in the parents.
Blue eyes. This is the next most common eye color, encompassing about 10% of the population. While blue eyes are more sensitive to light during the day, people with blue eyes tend to see better at night – unless there are bright lights.
Green eyes probably result from the interaction of multiple variants within the OCA2 and other genes. They were present in south Siberia during the Bronze Age.
Essentially, green eyes are unique. Most common in Western, Northern, and Central Europe, green eyes often point to German or Celtic ancestry. Currently, they can be found most often in Iceland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Britain, and Scandinavia.
Blonde fact #4: Not all blondes have blue eyes
That's why so many people around the world have black strands and brown eyes. Lighter tint gives rise to lighter coloured eyes, including blue, but also varying tones of green and grey. So, just because you have blonde hair, it doesn't mean that you have blue eyes too.
Green eyes and blonde hair are a rare combination. The high concentration of green-eyed, blond-haired people in Liqian is thought to be linked to their ancestry. The people of Liqian are thought to have possibly descended from Roman General Marcus Crassus' mysteriously missing army.
Did Elizabeth Taylor have violet eyes? These days, thanks to colored contact lenses, anyone can have violet-colored eyes . Taylor didn't come by her purple peepers that way; the first tinted contact lenses weren't commercially available until 1983. Taylor's eye color was the real deal.