Scientists generally agree that humans began to see blue as a color when they started making blue pigments. Cave paintings from 20,000 years ago lack any blue color, since as previously mentioned, blue is rarely present in nature. About 6,000 years ago, humans began to develop blue colorants.
“During the period between 45 and 30 million years ago, [the human pigment that had been UV sensitive] was in the final stage of developing its blue-sensitivity.
Even blue pigments and blue gems and rocks were rare in antiquity. People back then didn't need as many adjectives for color as modern times because there was nothing in their life in a hue beyond what they used. Blue didn't appear in Chinese stories, the Icelandic Sagas, or ancient Hebrew versions of the Bible.
Here's something you may not know: pre-modern people couldn't see the color blue. One reason you probably didn't know this is that it isn't true. But that hasn't stopped a lot of people over the years from claiming it's true.
Around 90 million years ago, our primitive mammalian ancestors were nocturnal and had UV-sensitive and red-sensitive color, giving them a bi-chromatic view of the world.
Blue was associated with the barbaric Celts who supposedly dyed their bodies blue for battle, women with blue eyes were thought to have loose morals, and descriptions of the rainbow in Ancient Greece and Rome omitted blue altogether. But although the color was not named, it still existed.
Some researchers suggest that human populations over the past 50,000 years have changed from dark-skinned to light-skinned and vice versa as they migrated to different UV zones, and that such major changes in pigmentation may have happened in as little as 100 generations (≈2,500 years) through selective sweeps.
Actually, the sky was orange until about 2.5 billion years ago, but if you jumped back in time to see it, you'd double over in a coughing fit. Way back then, the air was a toxic fog of vicious vapors: carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, cyanide, and methane.
The color blue that is found in foods, plants, and animals lacks a chemical compound that makes them blue, which makes the natural blue pigment so rare.
Human vision is incredible - most of us are capable of seeing around 1 million colours, and yet we still don't really know if all of us perceive these colours in the same way. But there's actually evidence that, until modern times, humans didn't actually see the colour blue.
Specifically, Tyrian purple, the production of which was a closely guarded secret for millennia, making the dye the rarest and most expensive color in history.
Tyrian Purple was so expensive that records show the Roman emperor Diocletian paying three times the dye's weight in gold for it. Interestingly the dye wasn't made from a nonrenewable source as we saw with Lapis Lazuli. Tyrian Purple was made from a pigment found in shellfish in the deep waters around Phoenicia.
The ancient Egyptians valued blue very highly and sought to represent it in a variety of forms. The deepest blue, imitating lapis lazuli, was probably the most sought after.
Researchers discovered the ancient pink pigments in 1.1-billion-year-old rocks deep beneath the Sahara Desert in the Taoudeni Basin of Mauritania, West Africa, making them the oldest colors in the geological record.
It turns out the color blue is a relatively new concept. Scientifically speaking, it has always existed as part of the visible light spectrum [rainbow], but studies of ancient texts have shown that humans didn't really “see” blue until modern times!
You're right, of course, Romans were able distinguish a blue sky from a black sky.
Part of the reason is that there isn't really a true blue colour or pigment in nature and both plants and animals have to perform tricks of the light to appear blue. For plants, blue is achieved by mixing naturally occurring pigments, very much as an artist would mix colours.
YInMn Blue (/jɪnmɪn/; for the chemical symbols Y for yttrium, In for indium, and Mn for manganese), also known as Oregon Blue or Mas Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was discovered by Mas Subramanian and his (then) graduate student, Andrew Smith, at Oregon State University in 2009.
Original Greeks were blonde and blue eyed...they later got darker due to the turkish influence. Having lived in Veroia for a few years I can say that there is a distinct blonde hair and blue eyed characteristic of the Macedonians.
It turned out that it wasn't just the Ancient Greeks who never said the sky was blue. None of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. What we now call blue was once subsumed by older words for black or for green.
Ancient civilizations had no word for the color blue. It was the last color to appear in many languages, including Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew. In The Odyssey, Homer describes the “wine-dark” sea. According to one linguist, every culture begins with words for dark and light.
Many scientists have believed that lighter skin gradually arose in Europeans starting around 40,000 years ago, soon after people left tropical Africa for Europe's higher latitudes.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
Humans invented the first pigments as early as 40,000 years ago. They combined soil, burnt charcoal, chalk, and animal fat to create a basic palette of five colors including yellow, red, brown, black, and white.