59: Why Ancient People Didn't See the Color Blue
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

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Here's a philosophical question for you. If a color doesn't have a name, can we still see it? Well, many years ago, the human eye evolved to give us the ability to see about a million colors. That's a lot. Then how come until very recently, nobody saw or even heard of the color blue? Well, it's because blue just didn't exist yet. Let's find out why. ♪

Blue is a mysterious color. To people of the ancient world, like the Greeks, blue wasn't a color at all. This weird story starts with William Gladstone, a four-time prime minister of Great Britain, and he was a huge fan of Homer. The same saints. No, not that Homer. Greek Homer. Oh.

Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and these two epic poems are considered the foundation of all ancient Greek literature. And much of modern literature is in some ways derivative of Homer. So Gladstone was reading the Odyssey and noticed Homer described the wine dark sea.

Not blue, not green, wine dark. And this description got Gladstone interested in other ways Homer used color to describe things. Homer describes honey as being green and sheep as being violet colored. Gladstone wondered if Homer was colorblind and saw blue as maybe something else.

So he went through thousands of pages of Homer's writing and counted his references to color. Black is mentioned almost 200 times. White about 100 times. Red is mentioned 13 times. Yellow and green fewer than 10 times. But blue?

So Gladstone looked through other ancient Greek writing. Nothing was ever described as being blue. And Gladstone's initial thought was maybe the Greeks saw color differently than other people. So researchers analyzed ancient texts from all over the world. The Koran, the Hebrew Bible, ancient Chinese, Hindu, Icelandic.

No blue. Not once. These ancient texts reference colors with pretty much the same proportion as Homer's epics. Black and white appear a lot. Red a few times. Yellow and green appear very little. But blue never appears at all. And human eyes are the same now as they were back then, so why couldn't they see blue? Simple. Is it? Everything was in black and white. No, that's not accurate. Hello. I've seen the movies.

All languages evolve in their own way, but almost universally, names for colors emerge in the same order. First, a language creates the words for black and white. The next color is always red. After red, it's either yellow or green. The last color to appear in every major language is blue. And this makes sense if you think about it.

How often does blue appear in nature? We see black and white everywhere. Blood is red, so humans are familiar with that color. But what in nature is blue? Only 10% of flowers are blue, so pretty rare. But even more rare in animals. Birds, mammals, reptiles, none of them produce blue pigment. Yes, there are a couple of blue butterflies, but that's not pigment. They're actually brown.

The color blue is created because of the way their wings are structured at the microscopic level. Same with blue feathers of peacocks or blue jays, blue toads, even people with blue eyes. That blue isn't pigment. It's the microscopic structure of the eye or the feathers or the skin that scatters the light in a way that appears blue. And since blue is so rare in nature, most ancient cultures didn't see blue as a separate color, but rather a shade of green. Languages are efficient.

why bother making up a word that you'll hardly ever need? The ocean wasn't blue, it was a shade of green. The sky wasn't blue, it was light black. Blue finally emerges as its own color when the Egyptians invented a way to produce a blue dye. Suddenly, the light black sky was blue. The Nile River, green for thousands of years, finally became blue. As Egyptian blue dye made its way around the ancient world, languages evolved to accommodate this new color. But before that...

Nothing. So unless you have a word to describe a color, it becomes really difficult for humans to perceive it. And there's proof of this even today. Researcher Jules Davidoff conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe in Africa. And like ancient cultures, the Himba have no word for blue. To the Himba, blue is just a shade of green. So Himba participants were shown 12 squares on a screen. 11 of the squares were green. One was blue. Can you pick out the blue square?

Now, of course you can. You found it immediately. But the Himba had trouble with this color. They had a lower reaction time than you or I would. But quick side note, you'll see lots of reports about this study that say the Himba couldn't see the blue square at all. That's not true. The BBC and Business Insider made that part up. It's a complete fabrication. Oh, wait a minute. I thought the media follows the science. Well... So the media only follows science if it fits their story? Uh, it would seem so. Well...

Well, you can knock me over with a feather. Anyway, what about this diagram? All 12 of these squares are green, but one of them is a slightly different shade. Can you pick out which one? Now go ahead and pause it if you need more time.

Could you find it? This square is slightly lighter than the others, and most of us can't see any difference. If we study the colors and try to really focus, we might get it, but it's not easy. But the Himba, they saw this different green as easily as we found the blue square.

The Himba don't just have one word for green. They have unique words and whole categories of words for many shades of green. Because of this, the Himba people are already primed to recognize them. Now, since they don't have a word for blue, they know it's different, but they can't really explain why. Here's another test. What color is this? Pink.

Right. This is easy because we have a name for this color. But the word pink doesn't appear in English until about the 13th century. Before then, pink was red. A lighter shade of red, sure, but still just red. And if you tell someone an object is light red without being more specific, that color will be different for everybody.

And scientists have learned that until a word is created to describe a color, people have a difficult time defining it. We now have mint green, forest green, Kelly green, and I'm sure art students and Crayola junkies can name a bunch more. But before these words existed, these colors were difficult to describe. Isaac Newton famously discovered the color spectrum, which is what colors? Roy G. Pitts.

Right. But where does red end and orange start? What color is indigo? Is it dark blue or is it closer to violet? Isaac Newton himself had trouble separating the bands. He initially thought there were 11 unique colors, but then he thought maybe just five.

But a week has seven days and there are seven tonal notes in a musical octave. And Pythagoras thought seven was a magical number, so Newton said, "Eff it, let's call it seven colors." In modern science, we measure colors in nanometers. So we could say with precision that pure yellow is 580 nanometers. But Newton didn't use wavelengths, he just

eyeballed it. That's not very scientific. It's not. Oh, Newton would have been a good journalist. I see what you did there. So if people require a color to have a name in order to quote unquote see it, are there unnamed colors visible to the human eye that we haven't yet discovered? It sounds crazy, but yes, there are.

Human vision is trichromatic. This means we have three different photoreceptors in our eyes that detect color called cones. We have cones for red, green, and blue. And every color we see is a combination of these. And this allows us to see about a million different colors. And people who are colorblind only have two functioning cone cells, which lets them only see about 10,000 shades. This is dichromatic vision. And most mammals are dichromats.

But a few years ago, a doctor in Northern England was found to have four types of cone cells. So her vision isn't trichromatic, it's tetrachromatic. This means she doesn't just see a million colors, she can distinguish up to a hundred million different colors. So she's like a superhero with the...

supervision well yeah at first scientists thought this was really rare but then they started investigating the phenomenon they found something interesting in the genetics of colorblind people colorblind men have two normal cone cells and one mutant cone that's less sensitive to either red or green light but the mothers and daughters of colorblind men

had one mutant cone in addition to three normal cones. About 1 in 12 men are colorblind, so about 8% of them. Based on this statistic, around 12% of the entire female population should be tetrachromatic, with the ability to see 100 million colors, 100 times more than the rest of us. So where are all these women? And what extra 99 million colors do they see?

Well, they don't even know they have access to these colors. Just like the ancient people weren't primed to see blue as its own color, women with tetrachromatic vision haven't been primed to see all these new colors. So one tetrachromatic woman was given a vision test, and she was shown a sequence of colors in rapid succession. People with normal vision see these colors as identical. But this woman was able to see the subtle differences.

Her brain was primed to make her aware that some of the colors she was going to see could be different. And she was able to pick out these small changes instantly and accurately. So what do these colors look like to the rest of us? Well, there's no way to describe it. Here's a quick thought experiment. How do you describe color to someone who's been born blind? Okay, I got one. Orange is like a warm summer's day. A gentle breeze rustles the pussy willows.

You can smell the honeysuckle. In the distance, the warble of a meadowlark. What are you doing, writing a haiku? I was being rhetorical. Oh, right. Yeah, colors are hard to describe. So our ancestors saw colors exactly the same way we do, but they never noticed differences until words were created to describe them. Isaac Newton learned that colors are not part of material objects. Color is just the way light is absorbed, reflected, and scattered by a surface. And if you think of it that way, color doesn't really exist.

It's just an interpretation of a wavelength. Bo Lotto, a neuroscientist at University College London said, there's such a thing as light, there's such a thing as energy, there's no such thing as color. Color is nothing more than the product of light, our culture, our language, and our own imagination.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do me a favor and like, subscribe, comment, share. That stuff really helps out a small channel. And until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.