Heavenly, azure, cornflower blue, turquoise, blue … eyes. For millennia, the blue color of the eyes was sung and deified, considered the standard of beauty and a symbol of holiness. These days, blue-eyed people are taken for granted and as a consequence of genetic laws, implying clever somersaults and combinations of alleles on the fifteenth chromosome.
Meanwhile, there was once no blue eyes at all. Blue-eyed is a very young phenomenon. Primitive people looked at the world exclusively with brown eyes. And how the first blue-eyed man was born in the world is a mystery that has not yet been revealed.
Genetic error led to color revolution
Let's just say that all blue-eyed people are mutants to some extent. Because blue eye color is the result of a genetic mutation. And it happened about ten thousand years ago. According to other sources, even later - about six thousand years ago.
Even more surprising is the fact that all modern owners of blue eyes are descendants of one single person who first manifested this (very tiny, by the way) mutation in the OCA2 gene, as a result of which the production of melanin in the iris was disrupted, which led to the appearance of a blue color. Blue-eyed people today have the same genetic mutation - they inherited the same change in the same place in their DNA, which is very clear proof that all blue-eyed people had one single common ancestor.
Recent studies indicate with certainty that the first blue-eyed "mutant" was born somewhere in the northwestern part of the Black Sea region during the Neolithic Revolution, when there was a massive migration of people from Africa to Europe.
Scientists cannot say what gender the "mutant" was - a man or a woman, but they say with confidence that this person, of course, belonged to the Caucasian type, that is, he was a European.
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It is not always convenient for life
Geneticists are not too surprised by the appearance of blue eyes as such. Human DNA is actually not that stable, so blue eyes could very well have happened, they argue. Much greater bewilderment among scientists is the fact that the mutation that once emerged did not disappear, but began to spread throughout the entire globe.
For a mutation to take hold, it must be beneficial to the species - this is required by natural selection. And the blue color of the eyes, not only did not give special advantages, but also was not always convenient for life. The fact is that the cornea of blue-eyed people is twice as sensitive to any mechanical stress as that of brown-eyed people, and almost four times more sensitive than that of black-eyed people. In addition, with an excess of solar irritant in blue-eyed people, a failure of defense mechanisms can occur, which leads to the development of certain diseases, as well as to increased nervous excitability, the development of migraines and the threat of a hypertensive crisis.
Therefore, it is doubly surprising that the first blue eyes appeared in a person in the south, in the conditions of the blinding sun.
In our time, most of the owners of blue eyes are found in Europe, especially in its northern part, and in the Baltic States. Among Estonians, for example, 99 percent are blue-eyed.
However, blue and blue eyes are not uncommon in Central Asia, the Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, as well as India and Pakistan. Carriers of the "blue-eyed" gene are found even among the Negroid race.
Random mutation or experiment?
Confusion is caused by the inexplicable suddenness of the appearance of a mysterious mutation. For millions of years people have had dark eyes, and suddenly - bang! - among them a blue-eyed child is born from ordinary dark-eyed parents. Why did it take so long? Why did the mutation manifest itself in this particular period of time (very favorable in terms of climate and living conditions, by the way)? What could have provoked its occurrence? And why are there really few blue-eyed people among the total population of the Earth?
Or maybe the blue color of the eyes, in fact, is not a random mutation, but a completely deliberate experiment that was carried out many thousands of years ago, and the ancestor of blue-eyed, in fact, is not an ordinary person at all, but a “guinea pig” of some mysterious “experimenters who owned the secrets of genetics?
Of course, this is where science comes into conflict with mythology. If, according to science, all modern blue-eyed people descended from one ancestor, then, according to myths, blue eyes were especially inherent in the gods. Maybe blue eyes are a part of the "image and likeness" of those very gods who decided to improve man?
Marina Sitnikova