How’s this for mindblowing…

(picture of my cousin with bright blue eyes)

According to an article I was just reading in Discover Magazine, the genetic mutation that caused blue eyes is now thought to be only 10000 years old (quite new in the “long time” sense of the world being around).

The primary reason for thinking that blue eyes are thought to be a new phenomenon is that the genetic similarities between a sample-set of blue eyed people from varied backgrounds and geographic regions showed that the similar genes responsible for the blue eye mutation (and associated mutations in general levels of melanin and skin pigmentation) were next to identical with little or no new genetic distortions in surrounding stretches of DNA.

Not only is the mutation thought to be new, but they also theorize that it can be traced back to a single ancestor! It just blows my mind to think that we are that we, humans, are so interrelated that everyone that has blue eyes are most likely from the same macro-extended family.

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This entry was posted on December 22nd, 2008 and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.