Note: This TL is for fun - any dissimilarities between it and OTL, I claim butterflies!
Any similarities between it and OTL are PURELY COINCIDENTAL.
Also, I'll try to mark any obvious POD or 'Speculation' with a *.
At somepoint between 6000BC and 4000BC...
Toks, short for a much longer multisyllabic name, stared at a slowly spreading vivid purple stain on the rag in his hand. He was pretty sure it hadn't been purple when he'd wrapped it to avoid getting cut winning the wager by crushing the seashell. The purple was truly vivid, he had never seen such a color. He waited until one of his friends had finished collected the wagers for him, then collared him.
"Have you ever seen anything like this??" he whispered fiercely.
"No, what is that? where did you get it?" his friend said, grabbing his hand.
With a quick whap to the back of the head, Toks wrestled his hand free, clenching it into a fist as several others looked over. "Idiot!" he hissed, glaring. "Do you know, it means I could get a dress dyed for Synxia that that no one else has you crazy fool!"
Since Syxia was considered the best looking single female, his friend promptly conceded the point. "But where did you get that color from? Was it a seaweed or-"
Toks thwapped him on the back of the head again and said "I'll tell you later, for now just SHUT UP." Since Toks was one of the largest fishermen in the village, his friend promptly shut up. By the time they docked, he'd almost completely forgotten about it.
A few days later, on a rest day, he was sitting out at the end of a dock, trying to mend a net before the sun set over the water and he lost the light, when he noticed that there were several more of those shells in the water ten feet below. Within minutes he had collected several dozen of them. Even the chill of the night as he sat, trying to dry off before he could go home, didn't dull his excitement.
Once home, he immediately brought them to his mother, "Mother, look, I found these under the dock - "
Interrupting her son, the elderly matron whacked him with a large wooden spoon and grabbed the mollusks, saying "I told you to bring home supper - a nice big fish or some lamb from down the way, but noooo, you have to bring home these! Fine, you'll eat them when I cook them!" and dumped them, shells and all, into a pan to boil them in oil.
Horrified, Toks went on with his evening chores, cursing to himself and occasionally stealing a look at the purple stain he'd saved when he'd won that wager days before. He took to carrying it, thinking he could tell her about it when he could get a word in, but then he bumped into her while carrying a load of firewood onehanded and the rag in the other. CRASH went the firewood one, she staggered another, and his hand, with the rag, started to go into the boiling oil. With a shriek, he flung himself away, inadvertantly dropping the rag into the pot, but thankfully saving his fishermens hands...