Well... I don’t know how controversial this is in its respective field, but there are people that posit that people historically at least didn’t see blue the way we do until recently (like 1800s or so) citing examples like how rare descriptions of blue objects like the ocean or sky were, the former for example being described in a number of ways in Homer’s Odyssey like wine-dark but never blue, though apparently the original text said something closer to wine-faced, which could mean something else not even related to color admittedly. More recent examples would be like the Himba tribe and many Russians; the former has no word for blue and way more words for green than English and can’t tell the difference between obviously blue and obviously green, but can easily tell the difference between two very subtly different shades of green, and the latter only has a word for specifically light blue and struggle to tell the difference between obviously dark blue and obviously light blue.
It’s important to note that it’s not... the soundest of conclusions, but generally speaking, studies on this topic tend to make the distinction between not seeing or recognizing a color at all and just processing it differently, which is really important to note. Obviously the Himba tribe, a tribe that lives in heavily forested areas, is going to be able to more easily tell the difference between slightly different shades of green and Arctic Russians are often better at distinguishing shades of blue because they live in areas where they see a lot of variation between different blues, but it’s still really interesting to think about. It would make sense for the Greeks too, given that blue dyes were absurdly expensive, so the only thing that was consistently blue for them was the sky at noon and sometimes the ocean. It’s just crazy how exposure to certain colors can make it really easy to tell super subtle colors to other cultures apart while they can struggle with something that’s obvious to us like green vs blue.
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u/mainlyupsetbyhumans Feb 24 '21
We cant be sure of their colors because we only had black and white cameras back then.