Fossils of an extinct animal will have impressed this cave artwork drawing


San folks painted the rock artwork panel between 1821 and 1835, he estimates.

“The tusked animal portray would possibly constitute a rain animal, an implausible creature related to San rain-making folklore,” says Benoit, of College of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

  1. This drawing in black and reddish brown shows an elegonated, speckled creature with what could be two long tusks curving down from its head.
  2. This black-and-white drawing shows the head of a tusked dicynodont peering out from some vegetation. The creature is now extinct.

San myths describe huge animals that when inhabited southern Africa prior to disappearing. If dicynodont fossils influenced painters of the tusked rock artwork determine, then that portrayal preceded the primary clinical description of dicynodonts in 1845.

Dicynodonts most often lived from round 270 million to just about 200 million years in the past. Researchers have discovered San stone gear on a number of eroding outcrops containing dicynodont fossils. The ones websites lie inside of 100 kilometers of the Horned Serpent panel.

Few clues exist concerning the extent to which Indigenous Africans have accumulated animal fossils and included them into non secular ideals and rock artwork (SN: 10/5/96).

At Lesotho’s Mokhali Cave, situated close to preserved dinosaur footprints and fossils, San rock artwork features a dinosaur footprint define and 3 dinosaur silhouettes. As astute footprint interpreters, San folks discerned that those creatures left no handprints or tail drag marks (SN: 6/11/15). Dinosaur silhouettes thus lacked hands and sported quick tails, Benoit says.


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