Fossils of an extinct animal may have inspired this cave art drawing

Unusual tusks on preserved skulls of dicynodonts influenced the look of a mythical beast painted by Southern Africa’s San people, a researcher suspects.

Sep 19, 2024 - 02:30

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Fossils of an extinct animal may have inspired this cave art drawing

Roughly 200-year-old African rock art predates the scientific description of dicynodonts

Faded paint on a cave wall appears to reveal two creatures, one in yellow top left and one in additional reds and blues, that create an animal with an elongated body and what appears to be tusks, in blue, near its head region.

A chronic-bodied creature’s downward sloping tusks (blue lines at upper right), painted by southern Africa’s San people in every single place the early 1800s, can have been influenced by fossils from extinct mammal relatives on the whole is generally often called dicynodonts, a researcher says.

Julien Benoit (CC-BY four.Zero)

African rock art depicting a mythical tusked creature may mirror the look of fossils of real-life ancient mammal relatives on the whole is generally often called dicynodonts.

Abundant, exposed fossils in South Africa’s Karoo Basin encompass dicynodont skulls with tusks that curve down and back, like those of the long-bodied animal depicted in roughly 200-year-old rock art by the region’s San hunter-gatherers, says paleontologist Julien Benoit. That painting appears among images drawn on a rock-shelter wall, dubbed the Horned Serpent panel, which encompass a scene of ethnic warfare known to have occurred as early as 1821, Benoit reports September 18 in PLOS ONE.

San people painted the rock art panel between 1821 and 1835, he estimates.

“The tusked animal painting may represent a rain animal, a really powerful creature linked to San rain-making folklore,” says Benoit, of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

San myths describe large animals that after inhabited southern Africa ahead of disappearing. If dicynodont fossils influenced painters of the tusked rock art figure, then that portrayal preceded the primary scientific description of dicynodonts in 1845.

Dicynodonts on the whole lived from around 270 million to nearly 200 million years ago. Researchers have found San stone tools on a couple of eroding outcrops containing dicynodont fossils. Those web sites lie within A hundred kilometers of the Horned Serpent panel.

Few clues exist in regards to the extent to which Indigenous Africans have collected animal fossils and incorporated them into spiritual beliefs and rock art (SN: 10/5/ninety six).

At Lesotho’s Mokhali Cave, located near preserved dinosaur footprints and fossils, San rock art incorporates a dinosaur footprint outline and three dinosaur silhouettes. As astute footprint interpreters, San people discerned that these creatures left no handprints or tail drag marks (SN: 6/eleven/15). Dinosaur silhouettes thus lacked arms and sported short tails, Benoit says.