Have you heard of the Blue People of Kentucky? The Fugates? I hadn’t until a few years ago when I was looking up information on the Appalachian Mountains that compose Great Smoky Mountain National Park…it was an obscure reference, so of course I had to look into it! Yes these people really had blue-tinted skin! What the what?!! Watch a Video about the Blue People
It turns out two people living in Kentucky in the 1820’s, Martin Fugate and and Elizabeth Smith, married and had kids. Both of the Fugates had the recessive gene that causes the chocolate brown blood and blue-tinted skin. Four of their seven kids had blue skin. Fortunately there are no physical health problems related to having blue skin.
And so the saga of the blue skin people took hold. Because there wasn’t a lot of travel, or opportunity for the same, there were many marriages of people who were already related; this caused more babies to be born with blue skin. As these people from the Troublesome Creek area started traveling and branching out they would marry others who didn’t have this recessive gene, so the blue skin people were no longer as common. However, as recent as the 1970’s a descendant of the Fugates was born with blue skin.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/the-science-behind-the-mysterious-blue-people-of-kentucky/
http://news.yahoo.com/humans-eventually-look-brazilians-140349518.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-reveal-todays-genetic-lesson/story?id=15759819