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Scientists Discover the World's Oldest Colors (phys.org)
1.1 billion-year-old bright pink pigments extracted from rocks deep beneath the Sahara desert in Africa are the oldest colors on record. They were discovered by scientists from The Australian National University (ANU), with support from Geoscience Australia and researchers in the United States and Japan. Phys.Org reports: Dr. Nur Gueneli from ANU said the pigments taken from marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, were more than half a billion years older than previous pigment discoveries. The fossils range from blood red to deep purple in their concentrated form, and bright pink when diluted. The researchers crushed the billion-year-old rocks to powder, before extracting and analyzing molecules of ancient organisms from them.
"The precise analysis of the ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in the oceans a billion years ago, which helps to explain why animals did not exist at the time," Dr. Gueneli said. Senior lead researcher Associate Professor Jochen Brocks from ANU said that the emergence of large, active organisms was likely to have been restrained by a limited supply of larger food particles, such as algae. "Algae, although still microscopic, are a thousand times larger in volume than cyanobacteria, and are a much richer food source," said. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
"The precise analysis of the ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in the oceans a billion years ago, which helps to explain why animals did not exist at the time," Dr. Gueneli said. Senior lead researcher Associate Professor Jochen Brocks from ANU said that the emergence of large, active organisms was likely to have been restrained by a limited supply of larger food particles, such as algae. "Algae, although still microscopic, are a thousand times larger in volume than cyanobacteria, and are a much richer food source," said. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
Yes, like saying: if a tree falls in the wood and nobody is there to notice, does it make a sound?
Sig?
Probably more correct to say "oldest rock color". Colors are meta data. It'd be like saying "We discovered gravity is the oldest force in the universe". The statement is nonsense.
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Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Looks like early Slashdot was OMG PONIES!!!
That the first plants were purple when they were utilizing a different wavelength of light.
I think we can accept part of the linked article - that pigments have been identified in very old rocks.
However, the phys.org piece then seems to claim that this is somehow "pigmentation", inferring that this is an aesthetic feature of the life form at the time. There is no suggestion that these life forms had developed organs capable of what we recognise today as "sight".
The simple fact is that chemicals generate colours. Copper sulphate solution? It's a cyan-blue. Potassium Permanganate solution? Tha's purple. But copper sulphate isn't blue for aesthetic reasons, it's blue because of the way that light interacts with the molecular structure of the compound. It is a direct result of the physical properties of the compound in question.
Treating this as though it were somehow a remarkable discovery is complete nonsense. We know that chemical reactions - inorganic as well as organic - produce compounds of given colours and pigments. I can put chunks of metallic copper in to sulphuric acid and get blue copper sulphate, but that isn't some pigment created by a life form. That's just chemistry.
In other words, what this article is establishing is not some aesthetic pigment produced by an ancient life form. It is, instead, identifying a potential range of chemical processes that the life forms could have used as part of their metabolism. Well, having a metabolism is one of the identifiable features of "life". It doesn't imply that the "colours" that result come from anything beyond that basic chemistry.
Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Color was invented, you just hadn't dug deep enough yet.
> Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
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Am I the only one who thinks the color on the photo is not "bright pink" at all? Rose petals are bright pink, this stuff is more bronze or something. I hate when science is disappointing Anyway I wish the article also explained what is considered a "pigment" in this research because (1) we can't confirm this was used as one and (2) everything is colorful and could be used as a pigment. Remember the paintings made with blood : hemoglobin as a red pigment.
Only on Slashdot you could make a bad joke about the technological development of television and it gets modded "insightful".
Mods? What the fuck is wrong with you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
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It's completely old. It's like, how much further back can you go? The answer is none - none more back
Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
I saw a documentary about that once and the invention of colour, it was called Pleasantville.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
Well, yeah. The evidence is indisputable.
Probably more correct to say "oldest rock color".
No, the oldest confirmed rock on Earth at 4.4 billion years old is a nice blue zircon.
However, the oldest "colour" in the Universe though is technically the Cosmic microwave background. Some of those photons used to be in the visible spectrum but are so old, dating from 300k years after the Big Bang, that the expansion of the universe stretched them into the microwave region. So, if anything, the oldest colour is what we now perceive as the black between the stars and galaxies.
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I was born in the late 70s and remember watching lots of older shows on Nick at Night that were black and white. I thought my parents grew up in a world that had no color and that color itself was invented in the 60s.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Because the photo technology that reproduced color hadnâ(TM)t been invented yet. No one knew that that was a something to care about until colors were invented. Seemed reasonable at the time, but now we wish they had thought a bit outside the spectrum.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Photos are more realistic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
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See you drips later, I'm going outside.
Don't Panic.
Color was invented 15 minutes after the start of The Wizard of Oz.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have an orange shag carpet that I'm sure is in the running for oldest.
Have gnu, will travel.
I took it as a Calvin and Hobbes reference.
It's a Calvin and Hobbes reference, as are the replies.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The headline and article writer(s) for Phys.org is/are using the term "color" to mean pigment. The should have used "pigment" like the actual researchers do. The summary author here was just copying the Phys.org headline (mis)usage.
If they wanted to stay with "color" they should have used a compound term like "organic color", "biogenic color", or some-such.
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Kinda logical that the oldest color would be pink, if you consider what the oldest profession is.
Colors, as in the natural colors of elements and compounds, have existed since shortly after the Big Bang. Nobody was around to NOTICE, but....
I think this article is more focused on the colors of the earliest biological organisms. As such, any claim for "earliest" is transitory, as some other compound may be discovered to have preceded it.
Linguistically, colors show up in languages at different times. So while people can distinguish colors they may not necessarily have words to give the colors names. A word for color may involve many different hues, for example the word Homer used for the color of honey is usually translated as "green". Blue is often a word that shows up relatively later in a language's life.
There's a lot of cultural stuff involved too - clearly the sky is not blue most of the time, it's usually grayish. And when it does have a blue hue it's very pale. But people say the sky is blue, and so we take it for granted. Similarly, I look out my window now and I see leaves on a tree that are more yellow than green, and yet my first thought is that they are green because leaves are supposed to be green.
Back when I was young, there was black only. Then a man dressed in white appeared and there was white and it was good. I think he was the doctor.
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