The other way round, if you happen to have done any serious recoloring work (e.g., those car configuraters found at the web[1]), you probably know that it's not just about changing the hue. The various reflective properties, diffusion and response to exposure are quite different for different colors and it boils down to reworking the entire histogram to achieve some credible appearance. So, yes, I think it's quite plausible that you may analyse the properties of a surface captured in b&w and recover the original color properties with some limited precision.
(Now, that we're spoiled by highly saturated displays with a limited color range and are used to ignore artifacts of image compression, this may seem quite far fetched. But when you are used to deal with analog images, yes, it's plausible. P.S.: And while we are at it, please stop colorizing images with colors that are obviously not the originals. It's not all the same, just because it comes in b&w.)
[1] Before there were renderings, you would get a product shot in a single color and all the other color versions had to be derived from this.