Scientists Discover the World's Oldest Colors (phys.org) 79
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.
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Kinda logical that the oldest color would be pink, if you consider what the oldest profession is.
Re:Silly headline (Score:5, Funny)
Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
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> 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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So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
Re: Silly headline (Score:2)
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Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
Re:Silly headline (Score:4, Funny)
The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
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See you drips later, I'm going outside.
Re:Silly headline (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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I took it as a Calvin and Hobbes reference [blogspot.com].
Re:Silly headline (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a Calvin and Hobbes reference [blogspot.com], as are the replies.
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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.
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Back when I was young, the world was still in black and white. Color wasn't invented yet.
Well, yeah. The evidence is indisputable.
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Re:Silly headline (Score:4, Funny)
Color was invented 15 minutes after the start of The Wizard of Oz.
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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
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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.
Oldest Color? (Score:3)
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Yeah, because in reality, BeauHD and msmash are just Perl scripts
In one of these cases, a Perl script would actually do a better job.
Re:Oldest Color? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a little odd. "Oldest rock color" doesn't really make more sense than "oldest color." What they meant was "the oldest deliberately compounded pigment."
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It is a little odd. "Oldest rock color" doesn't really make more sense than "oldest color." What they meant was "the oldest deliberately compounded pigment."
Still, it doesn't make sense. Colors have already been there all along. It is just that they can "extract" color pigment for use from what they found and believed to be the oldest source (but humans didn't exist at the time yet).
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The "deliberately" part was quite recent. Substitute "recovered biologically-compounded" for "deliberately compounded" and you finally have something.
Should Be Oldest Pigment (Score:2)
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.
Older Rocks and even Older "Colour" (Score:5, Informative)
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 [livescience.com].
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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One of the first colors arrived shortly after the development of chlorophyll, and it wasn't green. Yeah, probably lots of little green things in the blue ocean, but not enough to green the planet as seen from early satellite photos. The little green things brought the first oxygen, making possible little animals. But the oxygen also did something to transform to the appearance of our little planet: it turned earth red. Iron ore on or near the surface of earth began to rust.
Earth was very simple in terms of
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Bright pink? (Score:2)
I think what's cooler is (Score:1)
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I just google "purple tree" and I'm thinking of how awesome it would be if all the trees were purple. I think that many science fiction writers (movies and books) often don't seem to have as much variation in terms of what could really be out there. It kind of bothers me when everyone looks like humans and every planet looks like earth. Some of them definitely get it better than others, but I think even in the ones that tend to have lots of variety don't really stretch it too far from what we find on earth.
Re:I think what's cooler is (Score:4, Insightful)
I just google "purple tree" and I'm thinking of how awesome it would be if all the trees were purple. I think that many science fiction writers (movies and books) often don't seem to have as much variation in terms of what could really be out there. It kind of bothers me when everyone looks like humans and every planet looks like earth. Some of them definitely get it better than others, but I think even in the ones that tend to have lots of variety don't really stretch it too far from what we find on earth.
There are two answers why they do this. One is for pulp-sci fi; and the other is for more indepth scifi.
Novelists don't have this excuse- but for pulp Sci Fi on TV it's a lot cheaper to have aliens that can be played by humans with bits of plastic stuck to their faces to form ridges and bumps than it is to have non-humanoid aliens. Also for world sets- if the plants look earthlike, it's a lot cheaper and realistic looking to make a set.
There is another dimension to this though. A lot of the better Science Fiction novels are really critiques on society. By taking an alien futuristic world and changing one or two things you can make a social commentary about OUR society by exaggerating one of it's features. Most (good) science fiction isn't REALLY about other planets- it's about us on our planet; if you change too much and make it too unrecognizable it's harder to make your point.
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; if you change too much and make it too unrecognizable it's harder to make your point.
Like talking to lions [existentialcomics.com].
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you have to wonder if there's some convergent evolution going on as well.
Given an earth-like planet, several billion years, and the same sort of 'events' that life on earth has seen -- is it unlikely that evolution would arrive at something strikingly similar to what we have on earth?
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you have to wonder if there's some convergent evolution going on as well.
Given an earth-like planet, several billion years, and the same sort of 'events' that life on earth has seen -- is it unlikely that evolution would arrive at something strikingly similar to what we have on earth?
Yes, if only for the reason of time variance. 65 million years ago (a rather short time on the cosmological scale), the dominant forms of life on land were dinosaurs. Maybe ten million years before that and no flowering plants. Even Earth has only been "earth-link" for a small portion of its history. And many of the big events were pretty random so even in the unlikely event the planets started as the same, the time between events is going to vary radically.
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That the first plants were purple when they were utilizing a different wavelength of light.
Interesting thing about purple... ... Purple isn't real!
Well, at least pure purple light isn't real. There is no wavelength of light that is purple. Purple is how your brain interprets receiving red and blue light at the same time. Whenever you see purple you're actually seeing multiple colours at once, you're never seeing just one colour.
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Violet is a pure color.
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All colors are real. Colors are the perceptions of the human visual system.
Appealing to "purple" as a special case of "color" is not well chosen since what is denoted "purple" is ambiguous (actually a problem with color names in general, when viewed cross-culturally). "Brown" is a much better example since it is necessarily and always a color mixture.
You are claiming I think that only spectral colors are real, which they are, but not exclusively. Color mixtures are still colors. Spectral colors are rarely s
Hang On - False Argument (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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But not accept this: "claim that this is somehow "pigmentation", inferring that this is an aesthetic feature of the life form at the time"
And conclude this: "Nothing to see here. Move along, move along."
Only on Slashdot.
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Indeed. Melanin is not a fashion statement. It protects tissue from ultraviolet light.
Where is the pink (Score:1)
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As Spinal Tap might have put it (Score:2)
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Oldest? (Score:2)
I have an orange shag carpet that I'm sure is in the running for oldest.