CBS Sunday Morning show did a piece about this new discovery about the Blue Eyed gene and its ancestor. They said the ancestor originated from Europe.

Also, just because someone has brown or green or even gray eyes doesnt mean that their children cannot have a totally different either recessive or dominant eye color. The reason for this is learned in biology in highschool. Although someone might be born with brown eyes, somewhere along the line in their family, someone might have green or blue eyes. If that brown eyed person meets someone else who has blue eyes or green eyes, or they could even just be a carrier of blue or green eyes, at least one out of 4 potential children will have green or blue eyes, despite one or both parents having dominant brown eyes. It could be a 25% chance or a 50% chance that one child might be born with blue or green eyes. It all depends on the carrier genes and how strong they are, like if two recessive (which is blue) meet up, they dominate and a child born of them will be blue eyed, but if a dominate brown and recissive blue meet up, brown will dominate and one child born of them will be brown eyed, but if the brown eyes parent has a recessive blue carrier gene, another child born of them will be blue eyed.

Also, this carrier concept applies to other traits such as hair color, whether or not you have a hitch hikers thumb, whether or not you can twist you tongue and height. I am very short as are both of my brother despite having a father of 6'1. Our mother is slightly shorter than we are. So, it seems that somewhere in my father's irish riddled family, there was a dominate short gene that carried on through my father, despite his parents and his sister and brother being tall, and when it met with my mother's dominate short gene (despite her father being 5'9 (with her mother being as short as we), it produces three short children. However, should we, carrying the tall gene, have children with someone who is tall and or carries the tall gene with them as we do, at least one child will be tall.

It does seems confusing, and perhaps someone else could have explained better, but that's the best I could do at the moment. :D

Hope that helps. Byee!