Somewhere in the Koesberg Mountains of South Africa, deep in the arid Karoo region northeast of Cape Town, lies a stunning cave painting of a remarkable creature. The creature, known as the “Horned Serpent,” bears no resemblance to any animal that lives in the region today; the creature’s distinctive, downward-facing tusks are more reminiscent of a walrus, but the South African desert is a long, long way from the Arctic regions where walruses call home.
The horned serpent doHowever, they bear a striking resemblance to an animal that once called the Karoo home: a dicynodont, a prehistoric creature that inhabited the region some 200 million years ago. new article published on September 18 in PLOS One claims that the painting, which dates to between 1821 and 1835 and was created by the now extinct/Xan-speaking San people of the region, does indeed depict a dicynodont. It is based on the many dicynodont fossils found in the region.
Western scientists did not characterize dicynodonts until 1845, at least a decade after the Horned Serpent was painted. Julien Benoit, the author of the article, explains Popular science that the painting is therefore doubly important: “First, for the history of science, because (it suggests) the San would have found dicynodonts before Western scientists; and second, cultural (significance), because the San would have integrated fossils into their belief system.”
Dicynodonts were herbivorous therapsidsnotable for their mix of reptilian and mammalian features, and for their distinctive pair of tusks. (The name “dicynodont” comes from the Latin for “two dog teeth.”) Their heyday came during the Late Permian period, which began 260 million years ago and ended with the Permian–Triassic extinction event some 250 million years ago. As for many other animals, that event spelled disaster for dicynodonts, and while some species limped on into the Triassic period, the last of them were long gone by the end of that period—some 200 million years earlier homo sapiens first appeared.
This means, as Benoit says, “there is no chance that the San encountered a living dicynodont.” However, since fossils are relatively abundant in the Main Karoo Basin, where the cave is located, there is a good chance that the San found dicynodont fossils and recognized them for what they were: the preserved remains of long-dead animals. Benoit says, “This is also supported by the San myth that ‘great beasts’ roamed the land long ago.”
Benoit admits that skeptics may wonder whether the Horned Serpent is simply the product of a fertile imagination, rather than a relatively accurate depiction of an ancient creature. However, he notes that “pure imagination can safely be ruled out, since the San did not paint things that were entirely imaginary. Their art was based on elements from real life, primarily animals. The new contribution adds fossils to the mix.”
As far as we know, Aristotle was the first Western thinker to suggest that fossils were once living organisms, to put down the idea around 350 BC in his treatise Meteorology. Although the Horned Serpent painting is only about 200 years old, the San are one of the oldest cultures on Earth. They have lived in southern Africa for at least 20,000 years. How long they have been studying the numerous fossils scattered throughout their homeland is unknown.
Although the San still live in the Kalahari—they are often called the “Kalahari Bushmen”—that culture is not the one that created the Horned Serpent. “The San have occupied South Africa for thousands of years,” Benoit says. “But (although) the San still live in the Kalahari, they are of the !kung culture, while the San of the Karoo in South Africa were of the /Xam culture. The latter is completely extinct.”
The /Xam language spoken by the San of the Karoo had no written script, so like so many other sources of indigenous knowledge, their millennia of accumulated knowledge died with them. Benoit says: “Sadly, the /Xam culture was wiped out and we can only rely on archaeology and ethnographic recordings to study it. The side effect is that the more recent records are better preserved than the older ones, and as such, the further back in time we go, the harder it is to understand San culture.”
Nevertheless, there are tantalizing clues as to the extent of paleontological knowledge these cultures once possessed. One such piece of evidence is the Mokhali Cavelocated in Lesotho. It houses another piece of San rock art, made around 1810, which unmistakably depicts dinosaurs: “We know these are dinosaurs,” Benoit explains, “because they are depicted next to a painting of a dinosaur footprint, made in an area where fossil dinosaur footprints are common. The San saw that the footprints were not accompanied by handprints or tail tracks, and as such they imagined the dinosaurs as animals without arms and a short tail, quite similar to modern birds.”
As the article notes, “The study of African indigenous paleontology is still quite young, and the evidence remains correspondingly sparse and debatable, especially given the paucity of written records.” Benoit says he hopes this will change, and that we will be able to recover some of the wealth of knowledge lost with the destruction of cultures like the /Xam San: “I hope that in the future we will be able to trace this indigenous paleontology further back in time.”