Immigrants with Blue Eyes

Thousands of years ago, immigrants from today's Turkey and today's Iran came to the north of Israel, to the Galilee, and the arrival of these immigrants changed the culture of these regions. New studies tell us that these people brought new cultures and also changed the genetics of the local people, giving them blue eyes, something unknown in this geography.

From the DNA of the 600 bodies in the tombs of 6,500 years ago, archaeologists recently discovered the changes these historic peoples made. DNA analysis showed that the bodies kept in these tombs were different from the peoples who had lived in the region. Certain genetic differences corresponded to the peoples who live in Anatolia and in the Zagros mountains, which are now partly in today's Turkey and largely in today's Iran.

What is now Israel, formerly called Galilee, belonged to the region known as the Levant. The Levant today is considered the east of the Mediterranean, and between the years 4500/3500 before our era this region saw many changes. The strongest change was in the cave of 'Peki'in'. Peki'in is a village in Israel, between Akko and Nahariya, on a mountain called Mount Heron. Druze live in this village today. In his book 'The Jewish War' the famous Jewish historian Josephus speaks of this village. The cave measures 17 m by 8 m. There they found jars and offerings for the dead with hundreds of bodies more than 6,000 years old. DNA studies were made from the bone dust of certain bodies, and so it was learned that this DNA corresponds to what is found today in the Zagros regions. They showed that the genetics found belonged to people with 'blue eyes'.

The studies also showed that all those who have blue eyes belong to the same ancestors, living in Jordan, Turkey and Denmark. This line comes from women, that is, the maternal line, and this shows us that 49 per cent of the population of the Galilee have blue eyes.

All these studies make us think that the world always changed through successive migrations.

Adapted from Live Science