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Blue-Eyed People All Related
Are you one of the 300 million people in the world with blue eyes? If so, you might be part of one big family of blue-eyed people. Researchers think that all blue-eyed people are the descendents of just one person who lived six to ten thousand years ago.
Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen in the country Denmark made the discovery. He said that there is a gene called OCA2 that determines the color of your eyes. For some reason, that gene mutated or changed. Brown eyes are caused by a pigment called melanin. The mutation stopped the body from making the color brown, so the person with that changed gene had blue eyes.
Professor Eiberg looked at blue-eyed people from across Europe and the Middle East. He said that all people with blue eyes are descended from that single ancestor. He figured this out because all the people had the same amount of melanin, which means they had the same gene.
Brown-eyed people have different amounts of melanin, so they do not all go back to just one ancestor from 10,000 years ago. Professor Eiberg also made it clear that the mutation was not bad or good, it doesn't have any effect on people, it's just a matter of melanin in the eye.
I'm Adelbert and that's what happened in Science this week!
How well do you understand genetics? Find out in Just the Facts.
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