# Could early man only see three colors? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [January 7, 2005, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570 "2005-01-07T15:22:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2005, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/21 "2005-01-11T19:32:16Z")
> [@Echo\_7](#): > > Don’t the paintings from Lascaux prove they could see color? They could have shaded them gray. Obviously, the paintings were made by space aliens. Or Templars. Or the True Author of Shakespeare. ---
**Author:** ![Zakalwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zakalwe/32/270_2.png) [@Zakalwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zakalwe)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2005, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/22 "2005-01-11T21:08:19Z")
The book Cecil references doesn’t have a very good review on Amazon. Is anybody aware of an updated version (or a book on the same topic that’s a little more recent)? ---
**Author:** ![bdgary](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/5daacb/32.png) [@bdgary](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bdgary)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/23 "2005-01-12T00:56:45Z")
> [@don't ask](#): > > I recall reading many years ago that Joseph’s “coat of many colours” was a mis-translation of “coat of many fabrics” and that there are far fewer references to colour in the Bible than you would find if it were written by modern man. Using the King James Version of the bible, although not a history book even if it’s been studied as such at many institutions of higher learning, I find the colors purple, blue, green and yellow mentioned 51 times alone in the first 5 books! These books would have been written way before the epics referred to in the article. Yet, I would consider the ancient Hebrews/Israelites to be a relatively primitive people compared to other societies, particularly the Greeks and Romans, since a time span of many centuries or even a few millenia exist between the two. This would throw the “rules” mentioned in the article into question. Although these rules are somewhat logical, my search was based on colors from rules 4, 5 and 7, the bottom tier. Adding the color red to the search would add 10 more references plus all instances of the “Red Sea”. These first 5 books are very descriptive in nature which would explain all the references to color. Perhaps the epics focused more on plot and rhythm instead of detailed descriptions (forgive me; it’s been a while since I’ve studied them). Clearly, based on the bible, ancient man had visual, conceptual, and verbal understanding of different colors. My humble opinion is that there would be no reason to think that this would be untrue for any civilization going forward. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/24 "2005-01-12T01:51:30Z")
> [@bdgary](#): > > Using the King James Version of the bible, although not a history book even if it’s been studied as such at many institutions of higher learning, I find the colors purple, blue, green and yellow mentioned 51 times alone in the first 5 books! These books would have been written way before the epics referred to in the article. Yet, I would consider the ancient Hebrews/Israelites to be a relatively primitive people compared to other societies, particularly the Greeks and Romans, since a time span of many centuries or even a few millenia exist between the two. > > This would throw the “rules” mentioned in the article into question. Although these rules are somewhat logical, my search was based on colors from rules 4, 5 and 7, the bottom tier. Adding the color red to the search would add 10 more references plus all instances of the “Red Sea”. These first 5 books are very descriptive in nature which would explain all the references to color. Perhaps the epics focused more on plot and rhythm instead of detailed descriptions (forgive me; it’s been a while since I’ve studied them). > > Clearly, based on the bible, ancient man had visual, conceptual, and verbal understanding of different colors. My humble opinion is that there would be no reason to think that this would be untrue for any civilization going forward. I’d appreciate someone familiar with the Torah in the original (and it would be a nice bonus if they knew about Hebrew linguistics, but that’s probably asking too much) to comment on this. The KJV is a wonderful literary translation, but it is not absolutely literal and I would not rely on it to prove the conceptual range of ancient Israelite writing. One thing to consider is that many of these older cultures may not have had specific spectral-wavelength “color” descriptors but they may have had _simile_ color descriptors based on objects in the material world – such as “purple”, meaning like the fabric colored dyes made by Tyrians out of shellfish(\*); or Homer’s “wine-dark sea”. They obviously knew these were distinct colors, but did not find it in them to refer to them with a word independent of tangible, visible objects. (\*And BTW, “purple” in antiquity did not necessarily mean violet. It could also mean maroon or red) BTW the a specific example “Red Sea” doesn’t count. That translation was made by using the Western _name_ of the large body of water East of Egypt to fill in for text references that seemed to point to such a body of water, not by translating a description that the sea was colored “red”. On top of it, it’s apparently a _wrong_ substitution and the correct term in Exodus was supposed to be the [_ **Reed** _ Sea](http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/273/Q1/). Actual _written record_ of the Torah IIRC dates from as far or longer after the lifetime of Moses as does actual _written record_ of the Iliad/Oddyssey after the Trojan War. I Don’t think we have any absolute fix on when ANY of those stories were transferred from oral tradition to the form we now know. ---
**Author:** ![GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f1d935/32.png) [@GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GSV_Consolation_of_Dreams)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/25 "2005-01-12T11:05:45Z")
OK, so the ancient greeks had no word for blue or green? How did they describe the sky, sea and trees etc? ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/26 "2005-01-12T13:36:13Z")
> [@GSV Consolation of Dreams](#): > > How did they describe the sky, sea and trees etc? Just like the people _today_ who lack those words; they didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f1d935/32.png) [@GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GSV_Consolation_of_Dreams)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/27 "2005-01-12T13:52:45Z")
Really? So if an anthropologist were to find one of these people-who-have-no-word-for-blue today and point up at the sky and ask, “What colour is that?” How would the PWHNWFB answer: What colour is what? It’s a sort of light-red. It has no colour. It is the same colour as the Mbongo flower that grows in the forest to the East. /Puzzled. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/28 "2005-01-12T14:03:57Z")
> [@GSV Consolation of Dreams](#): > > OK, so the ancient greeks had no word for blue or green? > > How did they describe the sky, sea and trees etc? High and far, wet and deep, shady and tall. They’d presume every single non-blind human in Hellas would know what visual tone those things had so why use an abstract word for it? And if referring to some other object being bright blue or green, they’d say it was “as the sky on a clear day of summer” or “like the blades of the grass after the spring rains”. **IF** the standard translation is an accurate reflection (IF, again), Oddysseus crossed “the wine-dark sea”. Now, I don’t know of any vintage that comes out of the cask an aquamarine shade, or a sea that’s colored like grape juice, but Homer could have felt it more important in a literary sense to convey that they crossed deep water, as opposed to shallows where you could see the bottom, thus “wine-dark”. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/29 "2005-01-12T14:13:02Z")
> [@GSV Consolation of Dreams](#): > > Really? > > So if an anthropologist were to find one of these people-who-have-no-word-for-blue today and point up at the sky and ask, “What colour is that?” > > /Puzzled. And the PWHNWFB may in turn scratch his head and wonder what the heck made these outsiders so anal about fitting everything into their odd outsider taxonomies, to the point of wanting to stick some descriptor called “color” at something so obviously unique and impossible to confuse with something else as the sky. ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2005, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/30 "2005-01-12T15:21:50Z")
Grass is “blue” in Wales to this day. ---
**Author:** ![arnex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/eb8c5e/32.png) [@arnex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/arnex)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2005, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/31 "2005-01-13T03:19:34Z")
It would appear that the Greeks, when called upon, could improvise a description of [the color of a violet](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=iodine&searchmode=none) . ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2005, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/32 "2005-01-13T04:38:27Z")
> [@arnex](#): > > It would appear that the Greeks, when called upon, could improvise a description of [the color of a violet](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=iodine&searchmode=none) . In the sense that they could say, “X is the same color as a violet,” yes. ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2005, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/33 "2005-01-13T05:13:10Z")
> [@arnex](#): > > It would appear that the Greeks, when called upon, could improvise a description of [the color of a violet](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=iodine&searchmode=none) . They probably could, but I saw nothing in your cite that indicated an ancient Greek said anything about the color. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2005, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/34 "2005-01-13T09:18:12Z")
The information on primitive tribes isn’t, but the information on the Greeks is based on \*written records by specific people \*all of whom happen to be men So I’d like to point out that, in general, women are a lot more “worried” about color than men are; also, the descriptions in the Iliad don’t dwell a lot on “flowers”, but do talk a ton about what the warriors wore; what warriors wore was basically black, white and brown; evolution of color names has led to the English “purple” referring to a different-but-similar color than what is extracted from the flowers of “purpura”, so a similar thing can happen with brown and red hues. In general, a book written in Spanish will include a ton more adjectives and adverbs than one written in English (English has more verbs, so it’s considered a more “action-oriented” language than Spanish); an unofficial test run years ago at the University of Miami by myself and other Spanish-speaking students found that most Anglo males had no idea of the difference between “salmon” and “pink”; not a single Anglo knew the difference betwen blue and aqua; about half of Hispanic males knew both. Does this mean that a 2005DC Mexican has a more advanced technology than a 2005DC New Zealander? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2005, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/35 "2005-01-13T11:46:34Z")
The mental hurdle to overcome is that primitive man didn’t really have the words “black” and “white” as we understand them today. Instead, the entire colour spectrum was partitioned into two sets that happen to correspond to light and dark colours. It’s the same as how we think of everything from orangy-red to reddish tan to deep purplish red as all being “red” even though they are vastly different colours. ---
**Author:** ![simonjp80](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/46a35a/32.png) [@simonjp80](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simonjp80)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2005, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/36 "2005-01-14T10:15:10Z")
I’ve often wondered about oranges- was the fruit named after the colour or the other way around? William of Orange and the Orangemen seem to suggest that the name is fairly old, but I’ve no idea when the orange was introduced to Europe anyway. Does anyone know anything about this? ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2005, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/37 "2005-01-14T14:27:06Z")
> [@simonjp80](#): > > I’ve often wondered about oranges- was the fruit named after the colour or the other way around? William of Orange and the Orangemen seem to suggest that the name is fairly old, but I’ve no idea when the orange was introduced to Europe anyway. Does anyone know anything about this? Welcome to the Boards, **simonjp80**. But let’s do one column at a time! Cecil did a previous column on this –[What came first, orange or oranges?](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_344a.html) And, follow up threads by the Teeming Millions, which you can’t search for. [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=251649&highlight=orange](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=251649&highlight=orange) > **[Pale Red?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=244189)** > > In today’s column (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1\_344a.html), Cecil states that the adjective, “orange”, denoting a particular color, came into usage around 1620. Obviously, the actual color existed before that. So what did pre-1620 speakers... Read those discussions, and, if you still have a question, post a new thread about that column. ---
**Author:** ![Elizabeth\_Smith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/848f3c/32.png) [@Elizabeth\_Smith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elizabeth_Smith)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2005, 10:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/38 "2005-01-23T10:17:42Z")
I’ve been looking for material on this for quite some time. It popped into my head, believe it or not, from a weird reference I vaguely remember from an X Files episode, and for some reason I’ve remembered it lately. A little surfing on Google, and pop, I find this website with it’s excellent discussion on just this topic. From just a cursory glance, it appears that the “we just don’t have words for it” theory holds more water than any recent evolution in the ability of human beings to see more and more colors. As a student of classical Greek literature (in translation, I might add) I’d always wondered about the “wine-dark” sea reference, especially after visiting Greece and seeing the Aegean myself, but I always just chalked it up to Homer’s poetic license, or, possibly, the occasional “Homeric nod”. I’d love to hear other member’s ideas about this. It’s a fascinating topic. ---
**Author:** ![Mathochist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c89c15/32.png) [@Mathochist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mathochist)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2005, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/39 "2005-01-23T17:05:24Z")
Since someone bumped this, I thought I’d toss out a counterargument that I don’t recall seeing in this thread, but didn’t think of until last week. Many primitive cultures have very little in the way of number-language. The standard reference is some tribe which says “one, two, three, many”. Now, if the argument that an underdeveloped color-language implies an underdeveloped color-sense is valid, why wouldn’t it also be valid to infer that people in this tribe can distinguish one, two, or three of any object, but when they have four things in their field of view they blur into an undifferentiated “many”? That is, if the lack of color words implies a lack of visible colors, does the lack of number words mean these people cannot distinguish groups higher than three? I think you can tell what I think of this conclusion… ---
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2005, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570/40 "2005-01-23T17:50:15Z")
I suspect that the “standard reference” to a tribe that only has numbers as high as three is mythical. It wouldn’t take long for someone to figure out that three and one was different from three and two, etc. As a real-life example of a language with limited vocabulary, however, I give you Yiddish, which has only one word for “flower.” The language is thus unable to distinguish roses from violets from tulips, but I have no doubt that the viewers could distinguish them, just not name them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors/283570.md?page=3)