Ancient People and the Color Blue

Lately an article from Business Insider has been making the rounds on the Internet with the seemingly bizarre contention that ancient people may not have perceived the color blue. The article notes that "blue" does not appear in surviving ancient texts, with Homer for example describing the sea as "wine-dark." There has apparently been much debate in academic circles about whether Homer was blind, using the term poetically, or describing something he was really seeing.

The article seems to be making a case similar to that found in Julian Jaynes' 1982 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes hypothesized that since the narratives found in surviving ancient stories generally have to do with people blindly obeying "the words of the gods," this implies that ancient people literally experienced consciousness in the same way. Instead of unified awareness, they perceived "voices in their heads" as external presences that directed their actions, much like some schizophrenics.

The problem with this hypothesis should be obvious in this day and age, but it was less so in 1982 before the rise of modern brain research. It depends first of all on the assumption that popular writing styles directly reflect the awareness of the readers and writers. This would suggest that when fiction writing transitioned from the flowery prose style of the Victorian era to the minimalistic style of writers such as Ernest Hemingway the thinking of people in general became simpler. Needless to say, there's no cognitive research whatsoever that supports this idea.

Furthermore, we have such a tiny sample of ancient literature that drawing any conclusions about ancient people in general from it is hardly representative. We have no idea if all ancient writing resembled the texts we have, and we have no idea why those in particular were passed along. There seems to be no detectable anatomical difference between the brains of ancient and modern people that might explain differences in cognition, so neuroscience doesn't support Jaynes' hypothesis.

Finally, we can't discount the notion that ancient schizophrenics who heard voices and saw visions were thought to be in contact with gods rather than mentally ill, and thus compelling protagonists for stories. The actual incidence of schizophrenia is around 1%, so it's likely there were a fair number of them in every ancient society. We have no way of knowing if they were marginalized or pathologized by those societies the way that they are in ours, and there is some evidence that at least a few of them were considered prophets and so forth.

Where this relates to ancients and the color blue, the Business Insider article tries to make the point that since ancients don't seem to describe the color blue and use different words for phenomena that we describe as blue, maybe they didn't see the color at all. To support this argument, the article refers to research done by Jules Davidoff involving the Himba people of Northwestern Namibia. The Himba language does not have a distinct word for blue, and Davidoff hypothesized that because of this they might have more difficulty distinguishing it from other colors.


Here's what the article has to say about Davidoff's study:

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English. When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one.

[Note: I added the arrow to the image below, to indicate the different square.]

Can you? For most of us, that's harder.

Wow. That seems pretty convincing. Or at least it would, if the article weren't basically complete bullshit. First off, according to this analysis the difference between the blue square and the green ones in the first example and the slightly lighter green square from the other green ones is 4-6 times greater in terms of absolute color value. The screenshots are taken from a BBC documentary which may have slightly distorted the extent of the color differences. Still, it's hard to believe that anyone would have less trouble with the second image. That's probably why the article has generated so much traffic, because its conclusions seem so counter-intuitive

Furthermore, in the analysis article author Mark Liberman notes that he can find no publications of any study that shows what the article claims, and I believe that I have discovered why. The "research" does not exist. Here's a transcript of a talk given by Jules Davidoff in 2005 describing the nature of his study and what he actually found.

This is a group of people in Namibia who were asked to do some color matching and similarity judgments for us. It’s a remote part of the world, but not quite so remote that somebody hasn’t got the t-shirt, but it’s pretty remote. That’s the sort of environment they live in, and these are the youngsters that I’m going to show you some particular data on. They are completely monolingual in their own language, which has a tremendous richness in certain types of terms, in cattle terms (I can’t talk about that now), but has a dramatic lack in color terms. They’ve only got five color terms. So all of the particular colors of the world, and this is an illustration which can go from white to black at the top, red to yellow, green, blue, purple, back to red again, if this was shown in terms of the whole colors of the spectrum, but they only have five terms. So they see the world as, perhaps differently than us, perhaps slightly plainer. So we looked at these young children, and we showed them a navy blue color at the top and we asked them to point to the same color again from another group of colors. And those colors included the correct color, but of course sometimes the children made mistakes. What I want to show was that the English children and the Himba children, these people are the Himba of Northwest Namibia, start out from the same place, they have this undefined color space in which, at the beginning of the testing, T1, they make errors in choosing the navy blue, sometimes they’ll choose the blue, sometimes they’ll choose the black, sometimes they’ll choose the purple. Now the purple one, actually if you did a spectral analysis, the blue and the purple, the one on the right, are the closest. And as you can see, as the children got older, the most common error, both for English children and the Himba children, is the increase (that’s going up on the graph) of the purple mistakes. But, their language, the Himba language, has the same word for blue as for black. We, of course, have the same word for the navy blue as the blue on the left, only as the children get older, three or four, the English children only ever confuse the navy blue to the blue on the left, whereas the Himba children confuse the navy blue with the black

Read through that and then take a look at the Business Insider article. The Himba language doesn't have a single term for blue and green, it has a single term for blue and black. And what the experiment showed is that Himba speakers more commonly mixed up navy blue and black than English speakers did. That's an interesting observation, but it's a far cry from what the article claims. Black and navy blue are very close together in terms of raw color values, and while this shows that language seems to influence the categorization to a degree, the effect hardly resembles the claims made by the article.

It seems to me that basic fact-checking would have caught that the Himba conflate blue and black rather than blue and green. And I was able to find Davidoff's talk there with about five minutes of Google searching, which doesn't seem out of line for a professional publication like Business Insider to do. It's also possible that the source of the error is in the BBC documentary itself, but still, if you're a professional journalist, don't you think doing a little searching to verify outlandish claims makes sense?

In the end this seems to me to be another case of "ancient people were idiots," much like the story told in the film What The Bleep Do We Know? that argued the Incans actually couldn't see Francisco Pizarro's ships until a Shaman described them, because they didn't have experience with boats or something. Can you imagine how mentally deficient human beings would be if we could only perceive things we already knew about or understood? We would never be able to learn anything new.

As I've commented on a number of occasions, ancient people had a different knowledge base than we do, but there's no reason to think they were any less intelligent or perceptive than we are today. To claim otherwise seems to be quite condescending to our ancestors, who did quite well when it came to leveraging the knowledge that they had to work with. I suppose that the notion is appealing because some people want to think that because our scientific understanding has evolved it means we have as well, but in fact in biological terms ten thousand years is barely a blip for a long-lived species such as ours.