Light Pink is the Oldest Color in the World

Scientists believe they have discovered the oldest color in the world – and it is light pink, reports Phys.org.

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Researchers uncovered pigments produced by an ancient microscopic cyanobacteria after extracting pieces of 1.1 billion-year-old marine black shale deep beneath the sands of the Sahara in Mauritania, according to a study published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Scientists stated that the pigments are the “oldest biological color” and that they are more than half a billion years older than previous similar discoveries.

“Light pink pigments are molecular remnants of chlorophyll produced by photosynthetic organisms that inhabited an ancient ocean long gone,” said Nur Gueneli, a scientist from the Australian National University (ANU) who found the molecule during her doctoral research.

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Researchers ground billion-year-old rocks into powder and extracted and analyzed molecules of ancient organisms from them.

The remnants range from blood red to bright purple in their concentrated form, and light pink when diluted, the scientists said.

“Precise analyses of ancient pigments confirm that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in oceans a billion years ago, which helps explain why animals did not exist at that time,” Guenel said.

The rocks were sent to the university about a decade ago by an oil company searching for oil in the Sahara Desert.

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“Everything has a color, and colors take us back to the beginnings of time. A more accurate term to describe the discovery would be that it is the oldest organic biological color,” said Jochen Brocks, a German scientist at ANU and a senior researcher collaborating on the study.

This means that scientists have found a molecule with a biological pigment over a billion years old that has been preserved to this day.

He stated that it is akin to finding dinosaur skin remnants with the animal’s color still intact after 100 million years.

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“The fact that such a pigment can survive for such a long time evokes curiosity and wonder in us,” Brocks said.