The world's earliest known person to have blue eyes revealed

It has been revealed that a Stone Age man who lived about 7,000 years ago is the earliest known person with blue eyes.

17:33 27 January 2014

Scientists have identified the world’s earliest known person to have blue eyes. According to the study, he was a Stone Age man who lived about 7,000 years ago and was more closely related to modern-day Scandinavians.

His bones were discovered in 2006 and it was revealed that he had the dark-skinned genes of an African. Also, it was found that he was a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, was about 30-35 years old, and 1.7m tall.

Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, said: “The biggest surprise was to discover that this individual possessed African versions of the genes that determine the light pigmentation of the current Europeans, which indicates that he had dark skin.”

“Even more surprising was to find that he possessed the genetic variations that produce blue eyes in current Europeans, resulting in a unique phenotype [physical type] in a genome that is otherwise clearly northern European.”

“Blue eyes in modern humans are related to the same mutation in a gene called HERC2. If you have this mutation in both copies of the chromosome, you will have blue eyes for sure. This was the case with this man, who is so far the oldest known individual with blue eyes.”