Learning to Speak Blue, and Beyond

I bought a cheap book ($4.00) at a local bookstore. It's about languages and what we learn from learning different languages. One early part of the book talks about the discovery in the 1800s of Homer's writings and the lack of any mention of BLUE. They apparently didn't have blue in the ancient world (circa 1200BC). Another person, Lazarus Geiger, who had studied and learned many languages discovered that this had also occurred in other people and other places around the world. As humans developed/evolved, this characteristic was revealed in writings because nobody mentioned blue or green and the order of their reveal was always the same. This gives rise to many questions and I presume today's scientists have those answers. DNA changed, rather than the sun's light and things like that. But, can you imagine never seeing blue, indigo, or violet? What was it like for humans going back even earlier. Supposedly mankind learned something about color around 23 million years ago. Before that, did we see shapes in shades of gray (black in various brightness levels from none to full white)? This makes me think the French idea of black and white, noir et blanc, as the same thing is probably a concept from ancient times. They do have different brightness levels and that means White is a shade of the black hue.

Being a person who thinks of chronology, though I am quite terrible at it sometimes, I also wondered what we will evolve next. Apparently we have red, green, and blue (remember tv sets were RGB), but there is something (butterflies?) with two more color perceivers and another thing, shrimp(?), with 16 more color perceivers  which would give us not just 16 more colors, but all the mixtures of those 16 (as red & yellow give us brown). There are among us some super color vision people who are like this. I saw one short video by a painter who lives in California and she has a fourth color perceiver. She is extremely sensitive to various colors.

Being a person who lets the mind wander, intentionally this time, I began to wonder about our other perception capabilities and which of those might evolve further. Is this just limited to perception of colors? Perhaps our sense of hearing or taste or other things will give us new capabilities. The book says that just in Homer's time they had begun to see green. The colors revealed themselves over time from red, yellow, green, and finally blue (remember the color spectrum acronym ROY G BIV from school?). What do we perhaps perceive in part today which might become much greater in the future. Do we need 16 more color perceivers or would that become a burden? Do we need to hear as well as a hound dog or would that just be a distracting thing?

It may be possible that we only develop capabilities when our experiences demand it and a random few have less or more capabilities. This is true with everything about us. Is a chess player more successful because of greater memory/recall capabilities and is there a point at which that becomes too cumbersome and a problem? Is there a point where intelligence becomes more of a waste of time than of real use to succeed?

Here is a short video on the topic that is easy to follow and quite informative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-WuBbVe2E

I certainly don't mean to write a book report, but so far I'm fascinated and looking forward to other things I may learn from learning French.