We all had Brown Eyes

Put on your Desmond Morris hat:

All blue-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived 10,000 years ago near the Black Sea

According to a team of researchers from Copenhagen University, a single mutation which arose as recently as 6-10,000 years ago was responsible for all the blue-eyed people alive on Earth today.

The team, whose research is published in the journal Human Genetics, identified a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the northwest coasts of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago.

The gene does not “make” blue in the iris; rather, it turns off the mechanism which produces brown melanin pigment. “Originally, we all had brown eyes,” says Dr Hans Eiberg, who led the team.