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According to ScienceDaily.com a team of Copenhagen researchers have tracked a genetic mutation which occured 6-10,000 years ago and is repsonsible for all the blue eyed people you see walking around today.
“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine told Science Daily. “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”.
The researchers studied the mitochondrial DNA in countries diverse as Turkey, Denmark and Jordan.
Brown and green eyes can be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris but blue eyes doesn’t have the same variation of melanin.
Professor Eiberg says that blue eyes doesn’t represent a positive or negative mutation but just one of the changes that humans have developed over the years such as hair color.
“It simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so,” he said.
