Blombos Cave (Stevens’ Quilt III) mixed media on canvas 48 x 48 2016
The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.
The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste – everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.
This extraordinary discovery is reported in the journal Science.
It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors’ complexity of thought.
“This is significant because it is pushing back the boundaries of our understanding of when Homo sapiens - people like us – first became modern,” said Prof Christopher Henshilwood from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
BBC News, Jonathon Amos
- a door, gate, or entrance, especially one of imposing appearance, as to a palace.
- an iron or steel bent for bracing a framed structure, having curved braces between the vertical members and a horizontal member at the top.
- an entrance to a tunnel or mine.
- Computers. a website that functions as an entry point to the Internet, as by providing useful content and linking to various sites and features on the World Wide Web.
http://dictionary.reference.com/
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
The Idea Of Order At Key West, Wallace Stevens
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798, William Wordsworth
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Byzantium, W.B. Yeats
In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand things
And so exists no more.
The Rock, Wallace Stevens
Do the reverberations
Of the evening bell of
The mountain temple ever
Totally die way?
Memory echoes and reechoes
Always reinforcing itself.
On Flower Wreath Hill, Kenneth Rexroth
I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?
And he would say,
in a short time you will be here again.
And in the time between
you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
Averno, Louise Gluck