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The oldest blue-eyed man has been found. He lived 17 thousand years ago. This was a child with a difficult fate. Scientists have discovered the oldest blue-eyed person.

It turned out to be a child born with a heart defect about 17 thousand years ago. The results of the study were published in Nature Communications, and the ScienceAlert portal reports about them.

The child was born in the Grotta delle Mura cave in Italy. It was there that his remains were found in 1998 by archaeologists from the University of Siena.

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He had blue eyes, dark skin, and curly dark brown hair. It was his blue eyes that first caught the attention of scientists. The phenomenon is caused by a mutation in the OCA2 gene, which reduces the production of the pigment melanin, which is responsible for eye color.

This gene is associated with a single mutation that all modern blue-eyed people are descended from. Today, this mutation is found in about 40% of Europeans.

The analysis also showed that the child did not have the genes that would allow him to digest milk as an adult, which was typical for most people in the Paleolithic era. The child had to deal with severe stress in his short life.

‘This child had at least nine episodes of physiological stress, three of which occurred in the womb,’ said University of Bologna archaeologist Owen Higgins.

Scientists believe the baby’s mother was under a lot of stress during her pregnancy and may have been malnourished. Isotope analysis shows that she stayed in one place at least during the last part of her pregnancy.

It was the same place where the baby was born and lived out its short life. The baby had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, as well as a heart defect, which caused its sudden death.

Before this study, the oldest blue-eyed person was considered to be the Villabruna man, found in northern Italy, who lived about 14,000 years ago. Scientists believe that the boy’s ancestors may have been related to this man.

Earlier in Mexico, the remains of at least 42 children were discovered in the most important temple complex of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.

These were sacrificial offerings to Tlaloc, in which the Aztecs asked for an end to a severe drought in the 1450s. The bodies of boys aged 2-7 were mostly found in the burials.

The remains were placed in a stone box. Some children were buried with funerary gifts – a necklace and a bead. Above the stone box, archaeologists noticed traces of blue pigment, as well as the remains of other offerings – a pumpkin, sea animals, birds, an obsidian blade and sculptures resembling jugs with the face of Tlaloc. PLEASE  SHARE OUR STORIES

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