African rock artwork depicting a legendary tusked creature might mirror the look of fossils of real-life historical mammal family members known as dicynodonts.
Ample, uncovered fossils in South Africa’s Karoo Basin embrace dicynodont skulls with tusks that curve down and again, like these of the long-bodied animal depicted in roughly 200-year-old rock artwork by the area’s San hunter-gatherers, says paleontologist Julien Benoit. That portray seems amongst pictures drawn on a rock-shelter wall, dubbed the Horned Serpent panel, which embrace a scene of ethnic warfare identified to have occurred as early as 1821, Benoit experiences September 18 in PLOS ONE.
San individuals painted the rock artwork panel between 1821 and 1835, he estimates.
“The tusked animal portray might symbolize a rain animal, a improbable creature linked to San rain-making folklore,” says Benoit, of College of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
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Whereas the cave artwork paint has pale, that is what the legendary creature painted on a rock-shelter wall in South Africa appeared like. J. Benoit/PLOS ONE 2024 -
This black-and-white drawing reconstructs what a tusked dicynodont might have appeared like when it roamed Earth greater than 200 million years in the past. Marlene Hill Donnelly
San myths describe giant animals that after inhabited southern Africa earlier than disappearing. If dicynodont fossils influenced painters of the tusked rock artwork determine, then that portrayal preceded the primary scientific description of dicynodonts in 1845.
Dicynodonts usually lived from round 270 million to just about 200 million years in the past. Researchers have discovered San stone instruments on a number of eroding outcrops containing dicynodont fossils. These websites lie inside 100 kilometers of the Horned Serpent panel.
Few clues exist in regards to the extent to which Indigenous Africans have collected animal fossils and included them into non secular beliefs and rock artwork (SN: 10/5/96).
At Lesotho’s Mokhali Cave, positioned close to preserved dinosaur footprints and fossils, San rock artwork features a dinosaur footprint define and three dinosaur silhouettes. As astute footprint interpreters, San individuals discerned that these creatures left no handprints or tail drag marks (SN: 6/11/15). Dinosaur silhouettes thus lacked arms and sported brief tails, Benoit says.
