The Buddha's blue eyes (study)

Alex Kasprak (Snopes, 12/2/22); Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, Pat Mac (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddha had blue eyes as he was Aryan/Gandharan/Iranian from Central Asia (Dr. RP).

• CLAIM: All blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. blue eyes.

Do all blue-eyed humans share a single, common ancestor?

Physical characteristics of the Buddha, Item #29, deep blue eyes (Wiki)

• RATING: TRUE
• CONTEXT: All blue-eyed individuals living today are necessarily descended from one individual. Such a framing must be weighed against the fact that every single human alive today is likely descended from that same individual, as well.

I'm related to the Buddha? He was an Aryan?

(Snopes) 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."

Blue eyes on a ginger European (Edward Berthelot/Getty Images © Provided by Snopes)

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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.

Explanation

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:

• "Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation — about 800 to 1,000 years ago — you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago."

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." More