

Could early man only see three colors? - JacobAldridge
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/449/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors

======
jinushaun
Anyone who has studied a non-European language will be familiar with this
concept. Color names is strongly linked to culture. I'm Cambodian and the
colors "green" and "blue" are the exact same word. Context decides which hue
one actually means, for example a blue sky versus a green apple. Japanese also
has a similar conundrum with blue and green.

When a foreign color is introduced, often times the physical object most
associated with that color is used as the color word. Purple in Cambodian is
the fruit "plum", and pink translates to literally "pig color". In Japanese,
pink is literally "peach color". Even in English there is an example of this
phenomenon. Which came first? The color orange or the discovery fruit orange?

The title of the article is a misnomer. Other cultures see colors just fine.
They just don't have a name for it.

~~~
zeteo
"Which came first? The color orange or the discovery fruit orange?"

It seems the fruit came first, as it is mentioned in documents three centuries
before the color. The old English name for the color is "geoluhread" (yellow-
red).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word)>

------
51Cards
Wadda ya mean thousands of years ago? I thought as recently as the 1930's
everything was black and white and colour was discovered sometime during WWII.

Interesting article, I had never thought about early societies having limited
colour descriptors. I found the last part to be intriguing as the colour
progression somewhat follows the importance of environmental elements.
White/Black... day/night. Red: sun/fire. Green/Yellow: foliage/plants/food
Blue: sky Brown: earth. As stated in the article the definitions increase with
the ability to describe their environment and those items would be top of the
list.

~~~
srean
You surely mean this ?

    
    
      Calvin:  Dad, how come old photographs are always black
               and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
      Dad:     Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs
               are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
      Calvin:  Really?
      Dad:     Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime
               in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
      Calvin:  That's really weird.
      Dad:     Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
      Calvin:  But then why are old paintings in color?! If
               their world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
      Dad:     Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were
               insane.
      Calvin:  But... but how could they have painted in color
               anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
      Dad:     Of course, but they turned colors like
               everything else did in the '30s.
      Calvin:  So why didn't old black and white photos turn
               color too?
      Dad:     Because they were color pictures of black and
               white, remember?
      Calvin:  The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
    

But that aside, don't we still only see 3 colors. We have only three types of
color receptors and any color gets resolved, if at all, into varying responses
from three of them. To our color interpreter in the brain there are only those
3 axes. To us and other trichromats any color is a mixture of those three.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_ani...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_animals_that_are_trichromats)

Maybe the interesting question is when did we start naming the different
mixtures. There's another hypothetical question that has fascinated me: say I
perceive the color red as yellow, and it is some one to one map. But since I
learn the names of colors from people, I or anybody else will not realize that
I perceive them differently, I just happen to label them alike.

~~~
51Cards
Your latter question has always fascinated me as well. How do I know my 'red'
is your 'red'. My father was colour blind and I used to enjoy trying to
explain the missing colours to him and for him to explain what things looked
like. I quickly learned it's hard to describe colours someone else can't see.

I read an interesting article on colour perception once and about how the
physiology makes it pretty likely we all perceive 'red' to be 'red'. I will
have to try to find it.

~~~
srean
What I find quite ironic is that traffic lights happen to lie right in the
centre of the most common form of color blindness: red-green color blindness.

~~~
waqf
What I find quite ironic is that the UK's effort to combat this problem, by
adding a blue tint to their green lights, actually makes it more dangerous for
people with my form of colour blindness (protan, which is not the commonest
form of red-green blindness but is still significantly represented (2% of
males according to Wikipedia)).

That's because having little red vision, at night I mistake cyan ("green") go
lights for white street lights. Having street lights suddenly turn to yellow
stop lights is unnerving, to say the least.

------
kdeberk
So what about cave paintings? They have color. Take a look at the paintings in
the Acacus Mountains (southern Libya) at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadrart_Acacus>.

and

<http://www.ewpnet.com/libya/acacus/index.htm>

------
tomrod
I thought the Greeks were painting in very vivid colors?
[http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how-
ancient...](http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how-ancient-
greek-statues-really-looked)

------
hsmyers
We still argue about color names today--- no longer about the basic 7 or 8,
but over what to call the ones we can easily display on the screen. Even if we
limit it to say 256, it is hard to find universal agreement on what to call
them. If we expand that to what is possible to display on a high end device we
are essentially shit out luck with the taxonomy. And it is not just the web. I
can visualize the difference between Hooker's Green and Viridian Green and so
can most art directors I might run into. Can the average user? No--- unless
they've taken a class or to in water color or oils at the local art college.

~~~
thwarted
_what to call the ones we can easily display on the screen_

Things like RGB and CMYK, or even Pantone, are much less ambiguous than any
names than Crayola or Benjamin Moore comes up with. If the spectrum of color
is ordered in any given way, any point on it is uniquely and unambiguously
identifiable.

But you're still left with differences in perception (I actually perceive the
same object as slightly different colors in the same light with each of my
eyes, an optometrist told me this was common).

------
araneae
This kind of question is made absurd by our current understanding of evolution
and eye physiology. The ability to see a spectrum of colors was developed
millions of years ago. Ancient Greeks being able to only see 3 colors would
require a sudden and complete change in eye physiology, followed by its
miraculous recovery a few centuries later.

------
sliverstorm
The 'fact' that ancient Greeks may not have included blues in their work does
not surprise me a whole lot. As I understand it, blue has always been one of
the most difficult and expensive dyes to make out of natural substances.

------
jsdalton
There has been a significant amount of recent scholarship on this topic since
this Straight Dope article was published (in 1986):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#Recent_scholarship)

------
crux
Another factor that led to the original hypothesis of color deficienty,
disappointingly unaddressed here, is that the Greeks had habits of making
color comparisons that moderns would find quite loose indeed—for instance, the
sea was the color of wine, and sheep the color of bronze.

~~~
DTrejo
Dirty sheep can look yellowish no? And bronze is Yellowish.

~~~
cturner
I found shorn sheep that look almost bronze. :)

[http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://photography.nat...](http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/s/shorn-
sheep-
california-462896-sw.jpg&imgrefurl=http://ngmchina.com.cn/bbs/viewthread.php%3Faction%3Dprintable%26tid%3D1562&usg=__h4lKQutbOMHW-
Vb2I4P8BP0Myos=&h=600&w=800&sz=148&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=gYnjqa7jK5LmUM:&tbnh=138&tbnw=211&ei=SEg7TYDvO4iAhAftn7yKCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dshorn%2Bsheep%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-
GB:official%26biw%3D1304%26bih%3D887%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=1005&vpy=111&dur=741&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=130&ty=79&oei=SEg7TYDvO4iAhAftn7yKCg&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=30&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:0)

I've assumed things like the description of colours in these texts are an
attempt to produce an idolised version in the minds eye of the listener. That
is, an effect similar to watching a cartoon, or observing a caricature. The
use of bronze is clever in that it gives a heightened image of something that
is already somewhat observable to the viewer. But at times, perhaps there
could be loaded meaaning in the colours that we don't appreciate easily, e.g.
colour of wine and tyranian purple.

------
icegreentea
I'm pretty sure the ancient Greek's had some pretty good colour sense. Beyond
the whole painting all their temples in garish colours, they knew of (and
loved) Phoenician purple. If you can love a certain dye, then you can probably
tell it apart from say... plain old red or blue.

~~~
jinushaun
The article talks about the cultural differences between colour names, not the
ability to see colours themselves. According the article, what we call
"Phoenician purple", the ancient Greeks probably called "Phoenician red".

