Well, technically you're right, but I don't think the pigments in our skin made huge evolutionary advancements in ~100 years. I'd guess people were working more outdoors, but that's it.

So if you were to recolor a film you can take skin colors from today. But an advert, car color or fabric is incredibly difficult, even if you have the original, since the material will have degraded. Even if you repaint it with the original paint it will look different, since the paint will have changed, or if you use new paint the process to manufacture the paint (->led).

It might as well be another universe.

A couple years ago I used deep learning to recolor some old family photos. The net I was using would do it's best guess first, then present a limited set of options for me to choose from when it didn't know what to do. In general, its first pass would immediately make human faces look correct, but leave everything else really desaturated.

I think some of it comes down to the fact that convnets are really good at recognizing human "shapes" (faces, silhouettes, etc) and also the valid color space for human skin tone is pretty constrained if the photo was well lit and you have the luminance value for a grayscale image.

The network was particularly bad at getting the colors of balloons in a picture. I don't know what the real colors were, but the network was trying to tell me 4 of the balloons in a picture were pale yellow and beige while one was a super saturated red.