Where do they come from? I used to see click bait articles years back claiming they developed around 8000bc near the black sea but after the recent developments of genetic anthropology it seems they were much older.
4 separate ancient groups, the Western Hunter Gathers in Spain, the Scandinavian hunter gatherers in self explanatory, the Yamnaya in Russia and the Caucasian Hunter Gatherers in Georgia all have been revealed to have the gene in ancient times.
As the Caucasian man was believed have lived around 12 thousand bc the prior theory is completely debunked but its also interesting the so many unrelated groups carried the gene around the same time.
This leads me to believe there is an older origin in the most recent direct ancestor of all of these groups for blue eyes.
When Early European farmers arrived from Anatolia blue eyes might have drastically decreased until the Yamnaya re-spread the gene.
What do you guys who are knowledgeable in the field think?
>>464206
>When Early European farmers arrived from Anatolia blue eyes might have drastically decreased until the Yamnaya re-spread the gene.
Yamna were overwhelmingly brown-eyed. The steppe didn't become significantly light-eyed until much later. The couldn't have spread it unless you mean they absorbed other peoples who were already light-eyed.
>>464801
>Yamna were overwhelmingly brown-eyed
Source?
>>464822
From the supplement:
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/03/05/1316513111.DCSupplemental/pnas.201316513SI.pdf
... to this paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832.full.pdf
Only about 15% of the steppe samples (Yamna and Catacomb) even had the mutation for blue eyes (bearing in mind that there are numerous genes involved in eye color, but when talking about brown vs blue we're specifically looking at SNP rs12913832) let alone expressing it.
Blue eyes become prominent on the steppe during the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures, which is no surprise because they were probably the result of an eastward migration of a people who were already of mixed European Neolithic and steppe admixture.
>>464880
What did these steppe people look like before european mixing? White people with dark hair eyes?
>>464901
Modern ethnic groups are too mixed to find a close approximation, but in a pinch I guess any Volga-centered ethnic group like the Chuvash, Mari, or Volga Tatars would probably do. Though all three of those groups do have additional east eurasian / siberian admixture that would not have been present with the Yamna.
Light-ish skin, dark eyes, robust, tall. By the time they mixed with the European Neolithics (we're talking 2,000 BC and after on the steppe) I guess they wouldn't have looked much different than modern North and Eastern Europeans. Lighter hair and eyes, a more gracile skeleton, etc.
>>464880
I remember seeing results from Samara(EHG Ancestors to Yamnaya) showing that they were an even split between blue eyes and brown eyes
>>466572
But this isnt what really bothers me, what bothers me is that we have a CHG individual with blue eyes when they were supposed to be isolated in the mountains for thousands of years
>>466620
AFAIK none of the two CHG individuals were blue eyed. One of the two had dark brown eyes and the other probably had light brown. What was important about that individual with the light brown eyes was that he was at least heterozygous for the derived allele at SNP rs12913832 meaning blue eyes probably did exist there.
I also forgot to mention before that some of the Anatolian neolithic samples were probably blue-eyed as well. I'm not saying that the earliest farmers were this way in the Levant, but by the time they mixed in modern Turkey they probably had light eyes if even at low levels.
