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Single ancestor traced back for blue-eyed people

Posted: Jan 31st 2008 4:00PM by Adams Briscoe
Filed under: General Health

The University of Copenhagen out of Denmark has managed to trace the genetic lineage of blue-eyed individuals all the way back to a single ancestor. By studying various people from distinctly unique countries like Jordan and Turkey, they discovered that everyone had brown eyes in the beginning.

However, at some point in our history, a switch was triggered which caused brown eyes to transition to blue. The way this happened was that the amount of melanin in the iris became "diluted" as they put it. This switch appears in the same genetic spot for each person, linking back to a common ancestor. The scientists referred to this as a mutation of the "OCA2 gene" which toned down the amount of melanin produced.

It just goes to show you that mutations such as these can produce beautiful results!

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