The interpretation of a rock painting is causing controversy over the identity of a mystery animal that one academic says depicts a 250-million-year-old tusked herbivore.
Associate professor Julien Benoit, of Wits University’s Evolutionary Studies Institute, argues that an animal in a rock painting in the Eastern Free State (the Horned Serpent panel) is of a dicynodont and the inspiration is from fossils the San came across. His findings were published in the journal PLOS One.
The faded painting under a rocky overhang appears to show a long-bodied, slug-like animal with a tail, short legs, and two protrusions from its head. “It is obviously a dicynodont, which we find everywhere in the Karoo,” says Benoit, a palaeontologist. “The most likely hypothesis is that the painting was in large part inspired by fossils that were locally abundant.”
Dicynodonts were around long before the dinosaurs; they were squat and had a turtle-like beak and a pair of short boar-like tusks. The fossils have been found across the Karoo.
Benoit visited the site and discovered that dicynodont fossils were found close by, together with dozens of stone tools. “Those stone tools were made by the San,” he says. He argues that the hunter-gatherer San found the fossils on the surface, then painted their interpretation of these animals.
Not everyone is buying Benoit’s theory. Sam Challis, head of the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits, has been fielding e-mails from academics around the world who have dismissed the idea. Rock art researchers believe that the image is of a rain animal — a mythical creature. Rain animals, they say, are common in rock art. In detailed 19th-century scientific research there is no mention of the San painting fossils, says Challis. “To do this is to wrestle the meaning of rock art out of the San’s hands.”
Benoit says the dicynodont fossil image could have been the inspiration of a rain animal. Other images on the panel, says Challis, are understood to be associated with rain making. “All of the other paintings in this panel are diagnostic of healing dance postures. There is a guy sitting on the ground with his hand to his nose. That’s when you get a nosebleed when you’re in the healing [process] and that’s all over this panel,” he says.
Rock art expert Siyakha Mguni, of the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, says he would like to see more evidence of fossils having been painted by the San. He says the San, like other non-palaeontologists, would have found it hard to spot fossils. “Palaeontologists go through years of training. The process of identifying or finding these fossils is quite a complicated one, it is a specialised skill,” he says.
Benoit emphasises that early man and his ancient relatives did show interest in fossils and used them. He says a dinosaur phalanx (finger) was excavated by archaeologists in the 1990s in a rock shelter that was occupied by the San and was believed to have been carried into the site. “We know the Neanderthals were also picking up fossils and making jewellery out of them,” Benoit says.
Benoit says the San were known to add “new animals” to their paintings, among them domestic cows. “So there is no reason why a fossil animal present everywhere in their environment would have been excluded,” he says. “Saying that there are no San paintings of fossils because no previous evidence of San painting fossils was found leads to rejecting all the possible evidence brought forward.”
The academic furore over the painting prompted David Witelson, of the Wits Rock Art Research Institute, to make a recent visit to the Horned Serpent site to get a better look at the image Benoit claims is the depiction of a fossil. He took photographs of the image, which he ran through software that helped enhance the colours. “I wanted to get a closer look at what Benoit called the tusks, because it just doesn’t gel with everything else that we know. And it looked odd.”
After close examination Witelson believes the tusks protrude from under the chin of the animal. “It’s not entirely clear what they are. I’m quite sure that they’re not tusks. They’re not in the right position to be tusks,” he says. He plans to use the images as part of a response to Benoit’s research.
Benoit plans to continue his search and hopes to find more evidence of the San incorporating fossils into their culture. There is evidence, he says, of another San fossil-related image, this is of a possible dinosaur footprint in the Mokhali cave in Lesotho.
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