How Did Ancient Humans Get Blue Eyes?

How did ancient humans get blue eyes? For most of human history, everyone's eyes were brown. Then one tiny change, a dimmer switch in our DNA, turned down the brown in the iris of one person, and today hundreds of millions of people carry it. Ancient DNA from a cave in Spain, a skull from Cheddar Gorge and a grave in the Italian Alps reveals who had those eyes first: Ice Age hunters with dark skin. And the famous "6,000 to 10,000 years ago" date? It's probably too young. Chapters 0:00 Look in the mirror 0:51 There's no blue in blue eyes 1:49 One switch in our DNA 3:28 The face nobody expected 5:11 Why did blue eyes spread? 6:26 The date is probably wrong 7:20 Case closed Sources Eiberg, H. et al. (2008). Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression. Human Genetics, 123, 177–187. University of Copenhagen (2008). Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor. ScienceDaily, 30 January 2008. Olalde, I. et al. (2014). Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European. Nature, 507, 225–228. Brace, S. et al. (2019). Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3, 765–771. Lazaridis, I. et al. (2014). Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans. Nature, 513, 409–413. Mathieson, I. et al. (2015). Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians. Nature, 528, 499–503. Fu, Q. et al. (2016). The genetic history of Ice Age Europe. Nature, 534, 200–205. Simcoe, M. et al. (2021). Genome-wide association study in almost 195,000 individuals identifies 50 previously unidentified genetic loci for eye color. Science Advances, 7(11). Frost, P. (2006). European hair and eye color: a case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 85–103. Narration is AI-generated. Illustrations are AI-generated from our own prompts. #AncientHumans #BlueEyes #HumanEvolution