What Nationality Has Brown Eyes?
Pieter Maas
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Brown – Light brown iris can be found in Europe, West Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and among the Americas. With few exceptions, all mammals have brown or darkly-pigmented irises. In humans, brown is by far the most common eye color, with approximately 79% of people in the world having it.
- Brown eyes result from a relatively high concentration of melanin in the stroma of the iris, which causes light of both shorter and longer wavelengths to be absorbed.
- Dark brown eyes are dominant in humans.
- In many parts of the world, it is nearly the only iris color present.
- Brown eyes are common in Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas,
Light or medium-pigmented brown eyes can also be commonly found in South Europe, among the Americas, and parts of Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia,
Where do brown eyes in Europe come from?
What is the most common eye colour? – Most people have brown eyes,80% of people in the world have brown eyes, But that proportion varies according to the geographical area. If you look at Europe for example, you will see that people from the North generally have blue eyes, while that is rarer in those from Mediterranean countries, where most people have brown eyes.
Besides, when a European child is born, their eyes are generally blue, and the colour may change into its final shade a few months later. As for Asian or African children, they generally have brown or almost black eyes since birth. Green eyes are the rarest, since only 2% of people have green eyes. In Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, there is, however, a large proportion of people with green eyes,
Even rarer are those where the two eyes have different colours : this is a condition known as heterochromia, It can be the result of a melanin production issue. The pigment is then found in different quantities in each of the eyes. To sum up, several factors influence eye colour, which can also change over time, particularly depending on exposure to the sun.
Which Europeans have brown hair?
Geographic distribution – Brown-haired individuals predominate in most parts of Europe, In northern and central Europe medium to light brown shades are the most common, while darker shades prevail in the rest of the continent. Brown hair, mostly medium to light brown shades, are also dominant in Australia, Canada, South Africa among White South Africans and the United States among European Americans from the Northern, Central and Eastern European ( British, Scandinavian, Baltic, Dutch / Flemish, German (including Swiss-German and Austrian ), Slovenian, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian ) as well as Southern ( Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese ) and Southeastern European ( Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian ). Afghan children with brown hair Similarly to blond hair, brown hair occurs commonly among Australian Aboriginal and Melanesian populations. Dark brown hair is predominant in the Mediterranean parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia,
- Very dark brown hair, easily mistaken for black hair, can be found occasionally in parts of East Asia,
- This is also true of Southern Cone of South America ( Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, central-southern Brazil ), Colombia, Andean Region of Venezuela, Costa Rican Central Valley and Puerto Rico,
Dark brown hair also may occasionally be found among Indigenous Siberians and Americans ;(formerly) especially for mostly populations in Southeast Asia due to pigment changes (such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam ) for example particularly when they are young, as well as in many other groups
Where is the rarest eye color?
Home Eye Care Eye Color » Rarest eye colors Green is the rarest eye color of the more common colors. Outside of a few exceptions, nearly everyone has eyes that are brown, blue, green or somewhere in between. Other colors like gray or hazel are less common. Once upon a time, every human in existence had brown eyes.
That certainly isn’t the case any longer. The color of our eyes tends to play a big part in our self image and, in some cases, can be a genetic throwback to your family tree. It can be hard to even imagine what you’d look like with a different eye color. The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) conducted a survey to determine the eye color percentage of people across America.
The results are listed below, ordered from most rare to most common.
What type of eyes do Europeans have?
Why Do Europeans Have So Many Hair and Eye Colors? Peter Frost Université Laval (Canada) and St. Andrews University (Scotland). Most humans have only one hair color and one eye color. Europeans are a big exception: their hair is black but also brown, flaxen, golden, or red; their eyes are brown but also blue, gray, hazel, or green. This diversity reaches a maximum in an area centered on the East Baltic and covering northern and eastern Europe. Why this color diversity? And why only in Europe? Some believe it to be a side effect of natural selection for fairer skin to ensure enough vitamin D at northern latitudes. Yet skin color is weakly influenced by the different alleles for hair color or eye color apart from the ones for red hair or blue eyes.- Some have no effect at all on skin pigmentation.
- Others put the cause down to intermixture with Neanderthals.
- Yet, according to the mtDNA that has been retrieved, no genetic continuity is discernible between late Neanderthals and early modern Europeans.
- Perhaps there was some gene flow between the two groups, but certainly not enough to account for the large number of Europeans with neither black hair nor brown eyes.
For others still, this color diversity arose through random factors: genetic drift, founder effects, relaxation of natural selection, etc. But these factors could not have produced such a wide variety of hair and eye hues in the 35,000 years that modern humans have inhabited Europe.
- The hair-color gene (MC1R) has at least 7 alleles that exist only in Europe and the same is probably true for the eye-color gene (OCA2).
- If we take the hypothesis of a relaxation of selection, nearly a million years would be needed to accumulate this amount of diversity.
- Moreover, it is odd that the same sort of diversification has evolved at two different genes whose only point in common is to color a facial feature.
Thus, some kind of non-random process seems to have targeted hair and eye color per se, that is, as visible characteristics. But how? And why? For some, including the geneticist Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza, the answer is sexual selection. This mode of selection intensifies when males outnumber females among individuals ready to mate, or vice versa. Guppy males ( Poecilia reticulata ) caught on a single morning from a single creek (Brooks 2002). Rare-color advantage has been studied mainly in guppies and fruit flies but also occurs in other animals. In addition, a number of bird species exhibit color polymorphisms for which the mode of selection remains unclear. Representative eye colors (Sturm and Frudakis 2004) In other animals, bright colors are usually due to sexual selection. Sometimes the result may be a “color polymorphism” (see box). A potential mate will respond not simply to a bright color but also to a rare one that stands out from the crowd.
- By enhancing reproductive success, however, such a color will also become more common and less eye-catching.
- Sexual attraction will then shift to less common variants, the eventual result being an equilibrium that maximizes color diversity.
- This sort of rare-color advantage has been reported in humans.
An American researcher, Thomas Thelen, prepared three series of slides featuring attractive women: one with 6 brunettes; another with 1 brunette and 5 blondes; and a third with 1 brunette and 11 blondes. Male subjects then had to select the woman in each series they would most prefer to marry.
For the same brunette, preference increased significantly from the first to the third series, i.e., in proportion to the rarity of the brunettes. This rare-color preference may account for the wide range of human hair and eye phenotypes we see today. But why is hair and eye color so much more diverse in Europe than elsewhere? Perhaps because sexual selection was much stronger among ancestral Europeans than in other human populations.
Sexual selection intensifies when the “Operational Sex Ratio” (OSR) ceases to be balanced, i.e., when too many of one sex are competing for too few of the other. To understand why this may have happened in ancestral humans, we can examine the demography of present-day hunter-gatherer bands.
Such groups usually develop an OSR imbalance for two reasons: 1) hunting distances are longer and have increased the death rates of young men, typically because game animals are more mobile and/or less numerous per unit of land area; and 2) the cost of providing for a second wife is higher and has reduced the incidence of male polygamy (polygyny), typically because women are procuring less food for themselves through food gathering.
As a rule, OSRs are less balanced further away from the equator. In the Temperate Zone, and even more so in the Arctic, game animals roam over larger territories and gatherable food is less available in winter. The most extreme OSR imbalance occurs among hunting peoples of the “steppe-tundra,” where almost all consumable biomass is in the form of highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores such as caribou, reindeer, or muskox. Ecological zones in Europe at the last glacial maximum, ca 18,000 BP, Steppe-tundra is now reduced to fragments along the northern fringes of Eurasia and North America. During the last ice age, however, when modern humans first arrived, the Scandinavian icecap had pushed it farther south onto the plains of Europe. The more intense sunlight, combined with fertile loess soils, created an expanse of steppe-tundra with unusually high bioproductivity, even at the peak of the ice age. Less productive was the Asian steppe-tundra east of the Urals. It was drier, farther north, and largely polar desert, especially at the glacial maximum. Prospects were better for continuous and substantial human settlement on the European portion of this ecological zone. The European steppe-tundra was distinctive in another way. It took in an area that covers almost the same area where hair and eye color is today most diverse. Could this be an imprint left on the human genetic landscape by sexual selection? Perhaps. But more proof is needed. One tantalizing piece of evidence is the possibility that these new hair and eye colors are mildly sex-linked, as would be expected if women were more strongly selected for such characteristics. According to an unpublished British study, non-black-haired and non-brown-eyed individuals have longer second fingers in relation to their fourth fingers. This indicates that the new hair and eye colors are associated with a higher ratio of estrogen to testosterone before birth. Interestingly, blond hair has arisen independently among some Aborigines of central Australia and is more frequent there in women than in men. The Aborigine example points to another avenue for research: populations outside Europe among whom new hair and eye colors seem to have appeared independently. There are a few such cases: blond hair among central Australian Aborigines, brown hair among the Yukhagir of eastern Siberia, and fair hair among some Inuit bands of the western Canadian Arctic. Is hair color less diverse in such populations than in Europeans because sexual selection has been less intense or has acted over a shorter period of time? A final avenue for research might be to extract DNA from skeletal remains in order to chart European MC1R and OCA2 variability over the last ice age. If the sexual selection hypothesis is true, MC1R and OCA2 variability should have developed almost entirely during this time window (c.25,000 – 10,000 BP). References: Abbie, A.A., and W.R. Adey.1953. Pigmentation in a central Australian tribe with special reference to fair-headedness. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 11:339-359. Brooks, R.2002. Variation in female mate choice within guppy populations: population divergence, multiple ornaments and the maintenance of polymorphism. Genetica 116:343-358. Duffy, D.L., N.F. Box, W. Chen, J.S. Palmer, G.W. Montgomery, M.R. James, N.K. Hayward, N.G. Martin, and R.A. Sturm.2004. Interactive effects of MC1R and OCA2 on melanoma risk phenotypes. Human Molecular Genetics 13:447-461. Frost, P.2006. European hair and eye color – A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior 27:85-103 Hughes, K.A., L. Du, F.H. Rodd, and D.N. Reznick.1999. Familiarity leads to female mate preference for novel males in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata, Animal Behaviour 58:907-916. Makova, K, and H. Norton.2005. Worldwide polymorphism at the MC1R locus and normal pigmentation variation in humans. Peptides 26:1901-1908. Sturm, R.A., and T.N. Frudakis.2004. Eye colour: portals into pigmentation genes and ancestry. Trends in Genetics 20:327-332. Thelen, T.H.1983. Minority type human mate preference. Social Biology, 30, 162-180.
Do Italians have brown eyes?
Yes Italians Can Have Light Hair and Blue Eyes » Yes Italians Can Have Light Hair and Blue Eyes It is a common misconception that Italians must look a particular way. The stereotype is that Italians have dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. Nevertheless, hair and eye color vary in Italy and so does skin tone! It is not uncommon to see Italians with lighter eye and hair shades.
- Italians have all different eye colors including brown, hazel, green, and blue.
- There are blonde, brunette, and red-haired Italians.
- The more North you move in Italy the more frequently you will see Italians with blue eyes.
- The map below illustrates this trend.
- It is a common misconception that Italians must look a particular way.
The stereotype is that Italians have dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. Nevertheless, hair and eye color vary in Italy and so does skin tone. It is not uncommon to see Italians with lighter eye and hair shades. Italians have all different eye colors including brown, hazel, green, and blue. Source: The following map shows the percent of Italian who have blonde hair. As with eye color, the more North you go the more common blonde hair becomes.
The reason that Italians in the north are lighter than those in the south is partially based on the fact that there is more of a Germanic influence in Northern Italy and more of an Arabic influence in Southern Italy. Furthermore, there is a difference in the climate which definitely can have an effect on skin tone.
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: Yes Italians Can Have Light Hair and Blue Eyes
Do French have brown eyes?
Yes, many French people are blue-eyed. Although the majority of ethnic French people are not blue-eyed, rather brown-eyed. According to studies done recently, about overall 20.2% of the ethnic French population is blue-eyed.
Can brown eyed parents have a brown eyed child?
Is it possible for two brown eyed people to have a child with blue eyes? Editor’s Note (4/14/2021): The following article and diagrams present an over-simplified, outdated version of eye color genetics. Eye color is influenced by at least 50 genes, not all of which are well understood.
Yes. The short answer is that brown-eyed parents can have kids with brown, blue or virtually any other color eyes. Eye color is very complicated and involves many genes. To begin to understand how parents with brown eyes could have blue-eyed children, let’s imagine that eye color is due to a single gene, EYCL3, which comes in two versions or alleles, brown ( B ) and blue ( b ).
Remember that for most genes (including eye color), you have two copies of each gene, and that you inherited one from your mother and one from your father. The brown version of the eye color gene ( B ) is dominant over the blue version ( b ). Dominant means that if either of your genes is the B version, then you will have brown eyes.
- Genetically speaking, then, people with brown eyes could be either BB or Bb while people with blue eyes could only be bb,
- Example of a one-gene model for eye color.
- For two parents with brown eyes to have a blue-eyed child, both parents must genetically be Bb,
- When this happens, there is a 1 in 4 chance that these parents will have a bb child with blue eyes.
Unfortunately, eye color is not as simple as this. Besides the EYCL3 gene described above, at least two other genes, EYCL1 and EYCL2, are also involved. Although this set of genes explains how people can have green eyes, it does a poor job of explaining how blue-eyed parents could have brown-eyed children or how anyone can have hazel or gray eyes at all.
To understand green eyes in all of this, we only need to review EYCL1 and EYCL3 (EYCL2 is a poorly understood brown eye color gene). Remember, EYCL3 has two versions, brown ( B ) and blue ( b ). EYCL1 also comes in two versions, green ( G ) and blue ( b ). The way these genes work is that if you have a B allele, you will have brown eyes ( B is dominant over b and G ), if you have a G allele and no B allele, you will have green eyes ( G is dominant over b ) and if you have all b genes, then you will have blue eyes.
Example of a two-gene model for eye color. I hope this helps to answer your question. As you can tell, while some progress has been made, eye color is a very complex, polygenic trait that is not yet fully understood. : Is it possible for two brown eyed people to have a child with blue eyes?