Investigating the Invisible Color that Ancient People Couldn’t See

a reply to: RAY1990

Brown. One of the first pigments used in cave paintings. Still no word for it that we know of.

a reply to: toms54

S+F, man! This has to be one of the most interesting theories that I've read in a long time on ATS. Definitely thought provoking, thanks for sharing. I'm interested to see how far down we all go down this rabbit hole.

I haven't read the full thread, just the first couple of pages, however I wonder if this has been brought up in the context of people seeing ghosts, UFO's, etc. Could this be someone with the ability to see a color that they have no frame of reference for (infrared, ultraviolet, etc.) and their mind needing to come up with a form to describe it? It reminds me of a lot of folks having the IR lenses on cameras looking at the night sky and seeing significantly more there than could be seen with the naked eye. Very interesting read in general S&F!

Interesting thread.

I could see the different square. Pretty cool. Makes ya wonder.

This reminds me of the private language argument.

leolady

a reply to: toms54

Awesome post.

I remember reading a book many years ago called the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
The idea was that consciousness as we know it developed in the late Bronze Age with certain stages in the development of language and perhaps genetic drift with certain types of persons prevailing.
I think he made a good argument for a major shift in consciousness without proving it didn't previously exist.

Another interesting side thought is that the Ancients emphasis on "gods" and "demons" may be a result of developmental differences. We are too engrossed in our multi-faceted world to notice. Just as some children don't develop a "minds eye" imagination because of suppression, we may fail to notice subtile signs around us of an "unseen" world.

originally posted by: trollz
I could see the different green square. Could anyone else?

I couldn't see it to save my life.

The men of that tribe had to be blue-green color blind. Did the investigators bother to test any of the women in the tribe? Most men have a tendency to be color blind whereas women are not.

a reply to: toms54

Really ? Hmm..........

Researcher discovers a 55,000 year old artifact made out of oxygen?











www.theeventchronicle.com...

a reply to: toms54

There was a thread about this a few years ago. It is difficult to find now, but it may be worth your while.
The whole preposterous idea that the ancient Greeks couldn't see the color blue is based on a curiously myopic misinterpretation of poetic metaphor in ancient Greek literature. There are very good scholarly texts available on the web that explain it quite well. Here is one (non-scholarly but good):
www.nytimes.com...

If anyone is in doubt that the Ancients could see blue they need to look no further than ancient Roman frescoes of landscapes.

a reply to: AdAstra

I would almost bet the Romans had a word for blue also. The best I can say at this point is if a culture seems to have no word for blue, they may or may not have seen it. Some isolated peoples appear not to see it and some languages have the same word for what we today we recognize as two different colors.

a reply to: toms54

Love this - this idea that language forms our reality has always interested me

When I hear wine dark sea - I'm only hearing a metaphor for opaqueness. Water that isn't translucent. So again - when people assume Homer was describing a color, how much of that is language? How literal is a poet?

The part about the Egyptians naming blue - because they had blue sent me searching for more info:

Ancient Color Categories

Egyptian blue: more than just a colour

The History of the Color Blue: From Ancient Egypt to the Latest Scientific Discoveries

Thinking about it - either we could see it but didn't recognize it, or we couldn't see it? Is that biological, or something yet to be learned then categorized in our minds?

The Humans With Super Human Vision

An unknown number of women may perceive 
millions of colors invisible to the rest of us. One British scientist is trying to track them down and understand their extraordinary power of sight.

Maybe We're All Tertrachromats After All

So - your thread wrecked my entire day. I'm supposed to be working :-)

a reply to: toms54

Very Interesting .. I wonder if there
was a description to describe the color of the sky
on a Sunny cloudless day?

Has this been referenced anywhere.

a reply to: toms54

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but the Bible refers to blue as “lapis lazuli”. Many times ancient cultures would use like to describe like. For example, instead of saying something was “red” they would say it was “like blood”. The Bible does this often. At Daniel 10:6 he describes the angel as having a “body like beryl” which would have been a shade of green. Ezekiel describes his vision of God’s throne as looking “like lapis lazuli in appearance” or “eben-sappir” in the original Hebrew, both of which intending to describe something the color of sapphire blue.

originally posted by: DigginFoTroof
This is interesting in many ways. I think of the story of going to the moon and how they miraculously passed through the Van Allen belt without knowing about it at the time and not preparing for it, yet it now somehow poses an insurmountable challenge to go back to the moon and the reason NASA has given for being able to pass through it before was because "we didn't know about it then, so it wasn't an issue". Well that is a head scratcher, and that can be related to the saying "what you don't know can't hurt you".

So this could be a similar case, where people didn't know there was a color blue, so they didn't know to look for it.

I do remember that in early times (Phoenicians and early days of Israel) that purple was supposedly a very popular and luxurious color and is why it is still associated with royalty. I think it was harvested from some sea creature... Purple is a combination of blue and red. Red has the longest wave length and violet the shortest and blue is just a little longer than violet.

Violet 380–450 nm
Blue 450–495 nm
Green 495–570 nm
Yellow 570–590 nm
Orange 590–620 nm
Red 620–750 nm

I'm wondering if people have come to develop the lower wave length and that is why that color became associated with royalty maybe because they were the more evolved?

If things are going in the same direction then people will start to see things more in the "ultraviolet" band (UVA, UVB, UVC), which may be why some people are saying that the sun is so much brighter than it used to be. Many people have said that it seems many times brighter/whiter than it did years before (for me around 2007-8), could this be an evolutionary event happening today as well?



en.wikipedia.org...

Fascinating thread. Thanks. I did want to mention that some people perceive the sun as brighter because of the medications they're on, it's a common side effect of popular antibiotics and even SSRIs - light sensitivity- ... and many, many folks are now medicated. Just tossing that out there....

a reply to: Spiramirabilis

"Thinking about it - either we could see it but didn't recognize it, or we couldn't see it? Is that biological, or something yet to be learned then categorized in our minds?"

The biology of the eye hasn't changed. The cognitive part may or may not be biological. It does seem to be a pretty universal pattern worldwide.

a reply to: rigel4

Instead of color, they describe the weather.

a reply to: Jason88

Maybe they ate some mushrooms and started to notice blue.

a reply to: toms54

Ya never know... lol

Double double

a reply to: infolurker

Thanks … I believe you, and I really am trying, I just really cannot see that difference you can see. I can't see it

But there is a shade of red hue that in high school I called 'orange', and a teacher made me take the color blind tests, and I passed them all … but I really can split what most people call 'red' into 'red' and 'red orange' … so maybe the whole color wheel experience is interpretive to a degree between different individuals?

a reply to: Fowlerstoad

Pretty certain I once owned a box of crayolas with red orange.