“Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips – the world-standard samples for colour science – I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet. I concluded that there were indeed only a very few artworks before the 1860s that contained this colour from my childhood….
…I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on Earth.”
Allen Tager
https://psyche.co/amp/ideas/why-it-took-us-thousands-of-years-to-see-the-colour-violet
And more here…
https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/18/3-4/article-p262_2.xml?language=en
This Random Sense of Wonder 