It is not until modern times that people know what is blue

In other words, the definition of "blue" never appeared in human history until the modern and modern world.

The human vision is amazingly incredible - most of us are able to see about 1 million colors. Until now science has not explained the reason why all humans are aware of color in the same way. But there is evidence that: in ancient times, humanity was not visible in blue.

In 2015, researcher Kevin Loria wrote in Business Insider: until the late 1800s, blue was actually 'appearing' in the human world. Scholar William Gladstone - who later became British Prime Minister - also found that: in his famous Odyssey, Homer portrays the ocean as "dark wine" and other strange nuances, but he never used the word 'blue'.

A few years later, Lazarus Geiger - a literary linguist (who specializes in language and word studies) decided to delve deeper into this study. He analyzed ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew texts to see if they used colors in their lives. And he saw no language mentioning blue.

Picture 1 of It is not until modern times that people know what is blue
It was not until modern times that humans could see blue.(Photo: iStock).

Reading here will probably seem weird, but this is actually understandable, because out of the sky there aren't many things that are bright green. In fact, the first society with blue words is Egypt - this is the only culture that can produce green dyes. Since then, it seems that color awareness is spread throughout the modern world. But not having the word green signifies that our ancestors can't see it?

Much research has been done to try to explain this, and one of the most compelling reports was made by Jules Davidoff - a psychologist at Goldsmiths University in London. This research was published in 2006. Davidoff and his team worked with Himba tribe in Namibia. In their language, no word is only blue and there is no real difference between green and blue.

To check if the people here really can't see the blue, Davidoff shows the members of the tribe a circle made up of 11 green squares and 1 blue square. lam. As shown below, it is too easy for us to recognize the blue square.

Picture 2 of It is not until modern times that people know what is blue
The experiment distinguishes blue from green.(Photo: Business Insider).

But the Himba tribe has a lot of difficulties in finding a square with different colors than the other squares. They guess randomly and guess wrong many times, as well as take a long time before getting the right answer.

But one interesting thing is that the Himba have more words to indicate green than us. So, Davidoff conducted a reverse experiment. He showed the English speakers a circle of 11 squares with the same shades of green and a blue tinted square different from the others.

Picture 3 of It is not until modern times that people know what is blue
The experiment distinguishes the green nuances.(Photo: Business Insider).

As you can see above, it is difficult to distinguish which square is different in color. In fact, most participants did not notice any difference. On the contrary, the person in the Himba tribe could point out that 'lost' square right away (below).

Picture 4 of It is not until modern times that people know what is blue
Other colored squares.(Photo: Business Insider).

Another study conducted by scientists at MIT in 2007 showed that native Russians had no words to refer to blue, but had words to denote light blue (goluboy) and dark blue. (siniy). They can distinguish between light and dark blue nuances faster than English speakers.

All of these studies show that before the word was only blue, it seemed our ancestors didn't really see it . Or more precisely, they can see it as we see it now but don't realize the difference.