A mysterious tusked animal depicted in South African rock art could represent an ancient species preserved as fossils in the same region, according to a study published September 18, 2024 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Julien Benoit from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Horned Serpent panel is a section of the rock wall containing artwork of animals and other cultural elements associated with the San people of South Africa, originally painted between 1821 and 1835. Among the painted figures is an elongated animal with downturned tusks. does not correspond to any known modern species in the area. Because the San people are known to have incorporated various aspects of their environment into art, including fossils, Benoit suggests that the tusked animal may have been inspired by an extinct species.
South Africa’s Karoo Basin is known for its abundant, well-preserved fossils, including tusked animals called dicynodonts, which often erode from the ground. Benoit revisited the Horned Serpent panel and found that the tusked figure is similar to dicynodont fossils, an interpretation also supported by San myths about large animals that once roamed the region but are now extinct. If the tusk figure is in fact an artistic interpretation of a dicynodont, a species that became extinct before the dinosaurs appeared and was long extinct by the time humans appeared in Africa, it would predate the first scientific description of these ancient animals by at least a decade.
There is archaeological evidence that the San people collected fossils and incorporated them into their artwork, but the extent of indigenous knowledge of paleontology is poorly understood across Africa. Further research into indigenous cultures could shed more light on how people around the world incorporated fossils into their culture.
Julien Benoit adds: “The painting was created no later than 1835, which means that this dicynodont was depicted at least ten years before the Western scientific discovery and naming of the first dicynodont by Richard Owen in 1845. This work supports that the first inhabitants of southern Africa discovered the San hunter-gatherers fossils, interpreted them and integrated them into their petroglyphs and belief system.
