At birth, babies' eyes have a bluish color because a protein necessary to release melanin, a substance responsible for giving color to the iris, has not been completely released. Today we will talk about the blue eye origin, how humans got to have this eye color.
It is only after five or six months when the baby's eye color begins to be defined, and around two years when it has its definitive color.
What determines color is the variation in melanin levels, determined by genetic inheritance, combined with the effect of light interference, which gives rise to the full range of eye colors that we appreciate.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen discovered in 2008 the mutation of a specific gene responsible for regulating a protein necessary to produce melanin.
It is believed that all people had brown eyes until one genetic mutation in the OCA2 gene It triggered a process that literally "turned off" the ability to produce the brown color in the iris.
The first person to experience that mutation that gave rise to an original Blue Eyes presumably lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
From there, blue-eyed people have expanded to reach 10 percent of the current world population with blue eyes, being more frequent in Europe, especially in the Nordic and Eastern countries.
