The evolution of color

Dear Matthew Alice: I seem to remember reading somewhere that primitive people didn’t have as many names for colors as we have today. Is that true? Why would that be? Was everything in olden times less colorful than it is today? — M. Lindstrom, San Diego

Best anthropologists can tell, necessity being the mother of invention and all, things may have been just as colorful, but primitive man never tackled a project like Horton Plaza, so there was no need for trillions of color distinctions. “Dark” and “light” probably sufficed if you were living in a cave. The abundance of color names seems to reflect the complexity of a society’s technology, say scholars who’ve studied the evolution of color names in dozens of world languages. They’ve noted that all languages have words for black and white. In languages that have three words for colors, red is invariably the third; four-color languages use black, white, red, and either yellow or green; the fifth color added is either green or yellow, whichever is missing; sixth is blue, seventh is brown, and beyond that it becomes somewhat less uniform from language to language. Has something to do with the invention of the interior decorator, I think.