Genetic Archeology (very cool site in its own right) is reporting new research that suggests that all blue eyed people stem from a common ancestor 6-10,000 years ago.
“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA” says Professor Eiberg. Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.
Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.
