Could early man only see three colors? | Hacker News Reader

Could early man only see three colors?

straightdope.com

23 pointsJacobAldridge25 comments

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.

"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)

When does a color become a different color instead of a different shade of the same color?

For example, light blue and dark blue are two different colors in Thai, similar to pink and red in English.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was a kid, in Quebec, traffic lights were color-blind friendly; they used shapes and color and orientation. They arranged the lights horizontally, like this:

   [R] <Y> (G) [R]

For stop, you'd get two red squares. Wait was a yellow diamond usually on the left side, and go was a simple green circle on the right side. If you could only go in a few directions, they'd list them out with green arrows.

Seemed like a great system to me but I don't see it in use as much any more. Perhaps it was too expensive to manufacture custom lights for just one province.

you're talking about qualia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#The_inverted_spectrum_ar...

That's my favorite Calvin and Hobbes

http://brake-down.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/I...

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

I thought the Greeks were painting in very vivid colors? http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how-ancient...

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.

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).

We cannot display colors on a screen at all. Color is not a physical quantity, but a perceptual thing.

For example, try finding the RGB values for orange and brown, try explaining why your monitor can show deep blacks, even though they must be lighter than the 'black' you see when the monitor is off, or why the 'color' of some object can change depending on lighting conditions or the content surrounding it.

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.

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.

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...

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.

They probably didn't have sheep that were the result of a few millenia of selective breeding for easy to dye white wool. http://www.google.com/images?q=wild+sheep

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

I found shorn sheep that look almost bronze. :)

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://photography.nat...

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.

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.

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".

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