How the San people of southern Africa were able to paint an animal that predates dinosaurs

We will never know for sure what humans were thinking when they painted or etched on rock walls. Were the paintings simply scenes to accompany stories, kind of the Netflix of the time? What we do know is that, like modern artists, they did not always only portray the real world they saw around them, but also depicted motifs born of their imagination, perhaps with mythological or religious meaning. Some of these myths, experts think, may have been inspired by the discovery of fossils of extinct animals. And this may be the case with the painting of a strange creature with long tusks in South Africa.

Brakfontein Cave, on a farm called La Belle France in South Africa’s Free State province, contains rock paintings depicting typical animal motifs and hunting scenes, which were made by the area’s San people (formerly known as Bushmen), probably in the early 19th century. But there is something more to this mural, described in 1930 by George Stow and Dorothea Bleek as an animal resembling a fat snake with long legs and tusks, or perhaps a walrus. However, there have never been walruses in that part of the world, and the image does not seem to correspond to any real animal.

At least, none that are modern. The identity of this animal figure has been a mystery. But paleobiologist Julien Benoit of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, believes he has found the solution: it could represent a dicynodont, a type of herbivorous proto-mammal that lived before the dinosaurs. These animals, with strong bodies and horny beaks, emerged in the mid-Permian era, about 265 million years ago. They achieved a great diversity, from small rats to large elephants. Most of them disappeared in the Permian extinction 252 million years ago, and only a few survived during the Triassic, the dawn of the great reptiles.

Dicynodonts often had long, downward-facing tusks similar to those in the painting, so the resemblance is plausible. But how would indigenous people two centuries ago portray an animal that had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years? The answer lies in the fossils: dicynodont fossils are abundant in the area, even at ground level. Curiously, the estimated dating of the painting is at least 10 years earlier than the scientific discovery of the first one of these fossils in 1845, which would make the San the original discoverers of dicynodonts.

Benoit is not relying on similarity in appearance alone. According to the paleobiologist, San mythology speaks of extinct “monstrous beasts,” as Stow called them, incorporated into the Indigenous belief system. “Archaeological evidence directly supports that the San did find and transport fossils over long distances, and could interpret them in surprisingly accurate ways,” Benoit writes in his study, published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“In the painting, the dicynodont is used as if it were a rain-animal, a fantastic being destined to bring rain,” Benoit tells EL PAÍS. “When they enter a trance state, San shamans travel to the realm of the dead to bring a rain-animal to bring rain to the real world. Dicynodonts as rain-animals would be consistent with the fact that the San knew they were completely extinct.”

Fossil finds prior to the birth of scientific palaeontology have a long history of inspiring myths in cultures around the world. “In China, all fossils are considered dragon bones, and not just dinosaur bones,” says Benoit. In addition to dragons, giant humans, cyclops, unicorns and sea serpents have made their way into popular legends through these types of remains. And while these cases are well known in the East and West, indigenous African palaeontology is still largely ignored.

But there are precedents: according to Benoit, the most striking example of San palaeontology is the rock art in Mokhali Cave, in Lesotho. There, the Indigenous people reproduced a dinosaur footprint and painted three figures similar to these animals. “These silhouettes have no arms, because there are no hand prints in the footprints in the area, and they have a short tail because dinosaurs did not drag their tails,” says the palaeobiologist.

These paintings, Benoit adds, were made before the term dinosaur was even invented; in San mythology, dinosaurs were equivalent to a creature called //Khwai-hemm (with two initial slashes), whose name translates as a disturbing “devourer of all.” And even today, for the Basotho people of Lesotho, dinosaur fossils are remains of this same fearsome monster, which they call Kholumolumo.

Indigenous knowledge of fossils

“Dr. Benoit has made a very compelling case,” says Adrienne Mayor, a historian at Stanford University who has examined the influence of Indigenous paleontology on San myths and beliefs in her books The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton University Press, 2005). “The San are known for their knowledge of animal anatomy and their keen observations of their environment,” Mayor adds.

She points out that there are other cases of African fossils intertwined with mythology: in the 1990s, the Tuareg nomads of Niger led scientists to skeletons measuring more than 20 metres that jutted out of the ground on the Tiguidi escarpment, on the caravan routes. For the Tuaregs, they were ancient and fearsome giant camels that perished in a flood. The scientists discovered a new species of dinosaur in them and, as Mayor points out, “they called it Jobaria tiguidensis after the Jobar, the name of the terrifying beast for the Tuaregs.”

All of this is consistent with the fact that “the existence of ancient Indigenous knowledge of fossils is highly probable,” as Benoit concludes in his study. If all of this has gone virtually unnoticed until now, it is, above all, for one reason: the scarcity of written records. Today, scientists are joining the dots of different evidence to draw the lines of this ancestral knowledge, painted on the rock shelters of the African savannah and, possibly, in many cases still waiting to be discovered.

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