Someplace within the Koesberg Mountains of South Africa, situated deep within the arid Karoo area north-east of Cape City, there’s an beautiful cave portray of a curious creature. The creature, generally known as the “Horned Serpent,” bears no resemblance to any animal that lives within the area right this moment; if something, the creature’s distinctive downturned tusks bring to mind a walrus, however the South African desert is an extended, good distance from the Arctic areas that walruses name house.
The Horned Serpent does, nonetheless, bear a placing resemblance to an animal that when did name the Karoo house–a dicynodont, a prehistoric creature that inhabited the area some 200 million years in the past. A brand new paper printed September 18 in PLOS One argues that the portray, which dates to between 1821 and 1835 and was created by the now-extinct /Xan-speaking San folks of the area, does certainly depict a dicynodont–and that it’s based mostly on the plentiful dicynodont fossils that may be discovered within the area.
Western scientists didn’t characterize dicynodonts till 1845, not less than a decade after the Horned Serpent was painted. Julien Benoit, the paper’s creator, explains to Well-liked Science that the portray is thus doubly vital: “First for the historical past of science, as [it suggests] the San would have discovered dicynodonts earlier than western scientists; and second, cultural [significance], because the San would have built-in fossils into their perception system.”
Dicynodonts had been herbivorous therapsids, notable for his or her combination of reptilian and mammalian options, and for his or her two distinctive tusks. (The identify “dicynodont” comes from the Latin for “two canine tooth.”) Their heyday got here in the course of the Late Permian period, which started 260 million years in the past and ended with the Permian-Triassic Extinction Occasion some 250 million years in the past. Like for a lot of different animals, that occasion spelled catastrophe for dicynodonts, and whereas some species limped on into the Triassic Period, the final of them had been properly and really passed by the tip of that period–some 200 million years earlier than homo sapiens first appeared.
This implies, as Benoit says, “there isn’t any likelihood that the San met a residing dicynodont.” Nevertheless, on condition that fossils are comparatively frequent within the Foremost Karoo Basin, the place the cave is situated, there may be each likelihood that the San discovered dicynodont fossils and acknowledged them for what they had been: the preserved stays of long-dead animals. Benoit says, “That is additionally supported by the San fantasy that ‘giant brutes’ roamed the land a very long time in the past.”
Benoit concedes that skeptics may query whether or not the Horned Serpent is solely the product of a fertile creativeness, moderately than a comparatively correct depiction of an historical creature. Nevertheless, he notes that “pure creativeness could also be safely dominated out because the San didn’t paint issues that had been utterly imaginary. Their artwork was based mostly on real-life components, principally animals. The brand new contribution provides fossils into the combination.”
So far as we all know, Aristotle was the primary Western thinker to recommend that fossils had been as soon as residing organisms, setting the thought down round 350 BCE in his treatise Meteorology. Whereas the Horned Serpent portray is simply round 200 years outdated, the San are one of many oldest cultures on earth, having lived in Southern Africa for not less than 20,000 years. How lengthy they could have studied the plentiful fossils strewn round their homeland is unknown.
Whereas the San folks nonetheless dwell within the Kalahari–they’re sometimes called “Kalahari bushmen”—that tradition just isn’t the one which created the Horned Serpent. “The San have occupied South Africa for 1000’s of years,” says Benoit. “However [while] the San nonetheless dwell within the Kalahari, they belong to the !kung tradition, whereas the San of the South African Karoo belonged to the /Xam tradition. The latter is totally extinct.”
The /Xam language spoken by the San of the Karoo had no written script, in order with so many different sources of Indigenous information, their millennia of amassed information died with them. Benoit says, “Sadly, the /Xam tradition was worn out and we are able to solely depend on archaeology and ethnographic recordings to review them. The facet impact is that the more moderen information is best preserved than the older ones, and as such, the additional we return in time, the tougher it’s to grasp San tradition.”
However, there are tantalizing hints of the extent of palaeontological information these cultures could as soon as have possessed. One such piece of proof is the Mokhali Cave, situated in Lesotho. It homes one other piece of San rock artwork, created round 1810, which depicts what are unmistakably dinosaurs: “We all know these are dinosaurs,” explains Benoit, “as a result of they’re depicted subsequent to the portray of a dinosaur footprint, made in an space had been fossil dinosaur footprints are commonplace. The San noticed the footprints weren’t accompanied by handprints or tail drag marks, and as such, they imagined the dinosaurs as animals with out arms and a brief tail, fairly just like trendy birds.”
Because the paper notes, “The research of African indigenous palaeontology continues to be pretty younger, and the proof stays accordingly sparse and debatable, particularly given the shortage of written accounts.” Benoit says that he hopes it will change, and that we’re capable of recuperate among the wealth of data that was misplaced with the destruction of cultures just like the /Xam San: “I hope that sooner or later we’d be capable of hint this indigenous paleontology additional again in time.”