The colors have been one of the most intriguing questions of all time. How did the oldest color appear? How was it made? Can it be extracted and mixed with other samples to create another tone? Most of these questions have an answer in biology. Some colors captured the attention of the human eye from the very early humanity humbled beginning, and eventually led the Egyptians to wear white and gold dresses, to the creation of one of the oldest colors ever discovered: purple.
The difficulty in creating colors
The Egyptians liked the color because it was so hard to make that it was niche and exclusive to them. In ancient times, you would have to extract the components from Sea Snails and put them through a laborious and expensive process, which made the accessibility of the color very difficult. This way, only the royalty and the richest people could afford to wear something purple.
On the other hand, as the generations went on, the color became easier to replicate when mixed with other colors. Nowadays, you just have to mix red and blue to have a tone, and continue to test with others to find a darker or brighter version of it. But, colors remain one of the mysteries of humanity, as they can be found in the most remote places in the world, including the oldest color ever preserved in rock.
The oldest color ever found in the desert
About a decade ago, an energy company drilled into oil shale deposits deep in Mauritania’s Taoudeni Basin, West Africa. What came out of that rock surprised everyone. Researchers smashed up some of the shale, hoping to pull molecules from ancient organisms trapped inside. Instead, they found something no one expected: the oldest color ever recorded—a pigment that’s been hiding for over a billion years.
Nur Gueneli, a graduate student at the Australian National University, was the first to realize the breakthrough. When she mixed the powdered rock with an organic solvent, the team expected a black sludge, but the liquid turned bright pink instead. As senior author Jochen Brocks told The Sydney Morning Herald, Gueneli burst into his office, showing it wasn’t just any pigment—it was the oldest color ever identified, fossilized chlorophyll from cyanobacteria, ancient blue-green algae, preserved for 1.1 billion years.
The BBC reports that these pigment molecules, when diluted, look pink against sunlight, but in their concentrated form, they appear red and purple. For scientists hunting Earth’s earliest signs of life, this discovery is staggering—this pigment is 600 million years older than any found before. Brocks put it into perspective: “Imagine finding dinosaur skin that still shows its original color—green or blue. That’s the kind of discovery this is: the oldest color ever revealed.”
Other findings in the expedition
This find also sheds light on a big mystery in Earth’s history. Life has been around for 4.6 billion years, but complex organisms didn’t explode onto the scene until about 650 million years ago. Some researchers blame low oxygen levels, created mostly by cyanobacteria, for holding life back. But newer studies suggest there was enough oxygen a billion years before complex life appeared—so what else was stopping it?
Brocks thinks the oceans themselves may hold the answer. For over a billion years, cyanobacteria dominated the seas, creating an evolutionary bottleneck. These tiny organisms filled the oceans, but weren’t the best food for evolving life forms. Scientists compare tiny pigment-containing structures called melanosomes in modern birds with those found in rare fossilized dinosaur feathers. This lets them make educated guesses about the colors dinosaurs sported—who knows, maybe some were bright pink too, rivaling the oldest color ever found in Mauritania’s rocks.