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  • 2022-12-02 (xsd:date)
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  • Do All Blue-Eyed Humans Share a Single, Common Ancestor? (en)
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  • In January 2008, a team of researchers from University of Copenhagen made waves by identifying the specific genetic mutations responsible for blue eyes. Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, an author on the study, explained the nature of the team's discovery. Originally, we all had brown eyes, he said in a news release, but a genetic mutation ... resulted in the creation of a 'switch' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes. Media coverage focused on a specific aspect of this blue-eye-causing mutation — that it necessarily originated in a single individual, alive 6,000-10,000 years ago, who is responsible for all cases of blue eyes. In 2017, Business Insider reported that new research shows that all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor. In 2020, Unilad reported that scientists revealed that the genetic mutation [for blue eyes] came from a singular human being all those years ago. In October 2022, The UK Metro ran a story reporting that every blue-eyed person on Earth can trace their ancestry back to a single individual who lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Each of these articles is based on the same 2008 news release. And while these reports are factual, their framing plays into misconceptions about genealogical lineages. That misconception, as Scott Hershberger wrote in Scientific American, is that humans are all more closely related than we commonly think. In an October 2020 story, Hershberger wrote: This, geneticist Adam Rutherford explained, is because branches of your family tree don't consistently diverge [but instead] begin to loop back into each other. As a result, your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt. There is a point in human evolutionary history when the family trees of any two humans on earth could theoretically be traced back to the same two individuals. The time period in which these individuals were alive is known as the genetic isopoint. Rutherford, the geneticist, explained that if you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today. Scientists have calculated humanity's genetic isopoint to be between 5300 B.C. and 2200 B.C. This means that the ancestor responsible for blue eyes lived in a time that predated, or was close to, humanity's global isopoint. As a result, it is not only true that the individual responsible for the blue eye mutation is an ancestor to every blue-eyed human on the planet, it is also very likely true that every human alive today — regardless of eye color — is descended from that individual as well. For this reason, the claim is True. (en)
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