The salient difference was that his tribesmen stayed within their limits, simply putting the materials they had together in new ways, like handymen or bricoleurs.
For several hundreds of millions of years, the molecules mixed together, rearranging themselves in all possible combinations, becoming ever more complex.
Like Beat writers who composed their work by shredding and reassembling scraps of writing, Basquiat used similar cut-up techniques to remix his materials.