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| Monday, October 31, 2011 |
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Where Did It Begin?
By webmaster @ 12:01 AM :: 267 Views ::
0 Comments :: Sister Carol Perry
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The world keeps getting older, and I love it.
I definitely belong to the group of scholars who hold that biblical numbers are simply ways to say that things happened long, long ago. For a non-mathematical people, thousands was not a statement of reality, but of either age or immensity.
And so I am delighted when archeology and scientific discovery keep pushing the time line further back into the past, and the mystery deepens. We are still so far from the starting line, but each new discovery only poses more intriguing questions.
The latest is the announcement that scientists have penetrated the depths of a cave in South Africa, the Blombos Cave, and have stumbled into a 100,000 year old paint workshop! There they have found iron oxide powder and tools as well as abalone shells for mixing the paint. Obviously, red was a favorite color.
It boogles my mind to think of a people we 21st century sophisticates might be tempted to call primitive hard at work bringing beauty and color into their lives.
Until this moment the oldest rock cave art was dated at a young 40,000 years in the past. Now here are the raw materials of a Michelangelo who predates that by 60,000 years, and we still have not come to the beginning.
For those of us of the sound bite and the 140 character messages, how stunning is this newest example of the mystery that is the human story. Early mankind must have already been pretty far down the road when he/she saw the need for art and began mixing paint. And that was 100,000 years ago.
As the probing of earth goes on, I love the need to keep rewriting our most distant history. Have we even seen evidence of the adolescence of the human race? I think not.
Let's keep pushing backwards. |
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