TEBO1 · The Cave of Firsts

The imagined life of the 31,000-year-old wounded child of Liang Tebo, told across the deep past and the present-day return to the cave.

Central question, asked by the frame: what the care in us really is, and how far past our own kind it reaches. It was never ours alone. We stay in the company of other beings, in the blood we still carry from other kinds of human and in our kinship with the living world. The healed leg, the grave, the ochre hand are where that instinct gets articulated in the record, and in the end they remind us how much of it the body always knew. Each thread below follows one strand of it down the whole story. Pick a pigment to follow it.