Neanderthals are believed to have had blue or green eyes, as well as fair skin and light hair. Having spent 300,000 years in northern latitudes, five times longer than Homo sapiens, it is only natural that Neanderthals should have developed these adaptive traits first.
Forget everything you have read in the past few years.
I am dead serious.
Much of scientific material out there is politicized.
As for the genes for light eyes, there is a relatively high likelihood that they were inherited from Neanderthals too, rather than having emerged independently in Europeans fairly recently. It hasn’t been proven yet that Neanderthals had blue, green or hazel eyes because only one Neanderthal sample has been fully sequenced at present. But the statistical probability that such mutations would arise and be positively selected in Neanderthals, who evolved for 300,000 years in the high latitudes of Europe, is far higher than in European Homo sapiens, who have lived for only 45,000 years in Europe, and less than 30,000 years in northern Europe. Not all Neanderthal groups would have been blue eyed, though. Neanderthals were much more genetically diverse than modern humans, who all share a recent ancestry three times earlier in time than Neanderthals subspecies between themselves. If blue eyes indeed originated in Neanderthal, different Neanderthal populations could have passed blue eyes genes several times to Homo sapiens in Europe, the Middle East or Central Asia. It’s not even granted that the two main genes, OCA2 and HERC2, were passed at the same time or to the same people. They might only have converged later in Europeans. Another alternative is that only one of these genes came from Neanderthal while the other arose in Homo sapiens.
Sources include:
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.shtml