African rock paintings depicting a legendary tusked creature may mirror the look of fossils of real-life historic mammal relations known as dicynodonts.
Appreciable, uncovered fossils in South Africa’s Karoo Basin embrace dicynodont skulls with tusks that curve down and once more, like these of the long-bodied animal depicted in roughly 200-year-old rock paintings by the world’s San hunter-gatherers, says paleontologist Julien Benoit. That painting appears amongst photos drawn on a rock-shelter wall, dubbed the Horned Serpent panel, which embrace a scene of ethnic warfare acknowledged to have occurred as early as 1821, Benoit experiences September 18 in PLOS ONE.
San people painted the rock paintings panel between 1821 and 1835, he estimates.
“The tusked animal painting may symbolize a rain animal, a unbelievable creature linked to San rain-making folklore,” says Benoit, of Faculty of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
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Whereas the cave paintings paint has gentle, that’s 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 may have appeared like when it roamed Earth higher than 200 million years prior to now. Marlene Hill Donnelly
San myths describe large animals that when inhabited southern Africa sooner than disappearing. If dicynodont fossils influenced painters of the tusked rock paintings decide, then that portrayal preceded the first scientific description of dicynodonts in 1845.
Dicynodonts normally lived from spherical 270 million to only about 200 million years prior to now. Researchers have found San stone devices on a variety of eroding outcrops containing dicynodont fossils. These web sites lie inside 100 kilometers of the Horned Serpent panel.
Few clues exist regarding the extent to which Indigenous Africans have collected animal fossils and included them into non secular beliefs and rock paintings (SN: 10/5/96).
At Lesotho's Mokhali Cavelocated near preserved dinosaur footprints and fossils, San rock paintings includes 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: 6/11/15). Dinosaur silhouettes thus lacked arms and sported transient tails, Benoit says.