Why The Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue [6:39]

YouTube ^ | November 24, 2020 | AsapSCIENCE

[SunkenCiv]

I saw that in Calvin and Hobbes.

[SunkenCiv]

[singing] I’ll be a, uh, strange Christmas, without blue...

[spankalib]

Yes. See: "bluegrass"

Huge limestone deposits underneath the area around Lexington - makes the grass so rich, that large swathes of grass seem, well, blue! ;)

[Alas Babylon!]

Yeah, blue and red get mixed up when it come to vegetables in the German language.

The food is called Blaukraut, or blue/purple braised cabbage, but when they’re growing Germans call them rotkohl, or red cabbage.

[pepsi_junkie]

Before the invention of color tv the entire world was black an white.

It's true, and colors were pretty grainy and not especially vivid initially for a while but eventually our eyes adapted to it.

[Rockingham]

Human color vision can be affected by genetic factors and learned sensitivities. A common genetic variant is known as tetrachromacy and involves retinal pigments that make for greater sensitivity to red and green colors. Plausibly, that and other genetic factors may mute recognition and appreciation for the color blue.

In addition, toxic substances, alcohol abuse, and poor nutrition can impair color vision. Our modern era of abundant food, good nutrition, clean living, and good health care is not the norm throughout history.

Some aspects of ancient Greek literature may also be misconstrued. The famous Homeric phrase "wine dark sea" goes with bad weather, an effect that occurs on both fresh and salt water when the sky darkens with clouds and water churns due to wind and rain. Mere heavy clouds also tend to make open water seem dark, while cloudless sunny skies or light clouds make it appear blue.

Small boat mariners under sail of course have to be acutely sensitive to changes in weather and the sea. The very phrase "wine dark sea" suggests that The Odyssey was drawn from experience even if attributed to or related by a blind storyteller.

[ifinnegan]

Yeah. It’s ludicrous.

[z3n]

The sky must have not looked very interesting.

~~~

I'm not sure why they would have seen it as a murky gray though.

There were a few interesting historical tidbits in the video but it didn't seem to take much of a scientific approach at all.

For example, it is technically possible to be completely color blind and still have vision acuity because of the rod cells in the eye. But it is my understanding that most people who are color blind can still see color, but not all of them, as the video described. This is because there are supposed to be three types of color receptors in the eye, called cone cells. Red, Green, and Blue.

Well, did the Greeks and other ancients just not have blue cone receptors?

I suppose we can't know this without being able to study an ancient Greek subject, but why would many of the populations of the world suddenly develop cone cells in the last 10k years? Doesn't seem likely. So they discuss culture and language as the cause.

If this is the visible light spectrum, and if light works as I understand it, then people with only red cones and green cones wouldn't even know or perceive the higher frequency light waves (left side of the chart), and it all really makes sense. Maybe it's not language at all. I mean, did the ancients have a word for "violet" objects?



Which also makes me ponder the question as to whether it could be possible to perceive even more of the electromagnetic spectrum of you were somehow able to develop a fourth kind of cone receptor; Let's say an ultra-violet cone, for example. Perhaps there is no practical reason to since ultraviolet radiation is harmful to biological cells and the most intense source of it is the sun. But why not infrared cones? Then you could see thermal light, and could hunt more easily at night.

[yesthatjallen]

This idea has been bouncing around the internet recently.

If they didn't see blue or call it blue, they certainly recognized the color "they didn't see" with the color found in nature.

Ancient Greece depiction of dolphins

This is part 'lost in translation' and attributing contemporary ideas with those of the past which can change over time.

Why would Homer describe the sea as "wine-dark'? Because the ocean has many different colors, as does the sky, during different times of the day and weather conditions. Also, "wine-dark" could also be an allusion to war being dark and bloody and he's making reference to sailing in foreboding waters.

[T Ruth]

I have read that "grey-eyed Athene" really had blue eyes.

Also, why are blackberries red when they're green?

[married21]

Thank you for the explanation.

[Chicory]

I think about it like this green jacket I used to have that most of my family considered to be blue. You know that color? Aim toothpaste is the same way.

Anyway, I don’t think the Greeks *saw* the sky as murky gray; I think they saw it as a pretty shade of gray as opposed to the murky gray of storm clouds.

I think they saw everything the same way we do but their ideas of colors were different. They might have said something like, Oh, I love the color of your jacket, the exact shade of gray as the sky on a sunny day! when we might say, I love the sky blue color of your jacket!