The Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France in the Free State province of South Africa was painted by the San people at least two hundred years ago. It pictures, among many other elements, a tusked animal with a head that resembles that of a dicynodont, the fossils of which are abundant and conspicuous in the South African Karoo Basin. This picture also seemingly relates to a local San myth about large animals that once roamed southern Africa and are now extinct. This suggests the existence of a San geomyth about dicynodonts.
Interpretation of the tusked animal of the Horned Serpent panel and its dicynodont-like traits. Image credit: J. Benoit, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309908.
The Horned Serpent panel is a section of rock wall featuring artwork of animals and other cultural elements associated with the San people of South Africa, originally painted between 1821 and 1835.
Among the painted figures is a long-bodied animal with downward-turned tusks which doesn’t match any known modern species in the area.
“As the San people are known to have included various aspects of their surroundings into art, including fossils, the tusked creature might have been inspired by an extinct species,” said University of the Witwatersrand researcher Julien Benoit.
The Karoo Basin of South Africa is famous for abundant well-preserved fossils, including tusked animals called dicynodonts, which are often found eroding out of the ground.
Dr. Benoit revisited the Horned Serpent panel and found the tusked figure comparable with dicynodont fossils, an interpretation that is also supported by San myths of large animals that once roamed the region but are now extinct.
If the tusked figure is in fact an artistic interpretation of a dicynodont, a species which went extinct before dinosaurs appeared and were long extinct when humans appeared in Africa, it would predate the first scientific description of these ancient animals by at least ten years.
There is archaeological evidence that the San people might have collected fossils and incorporated them into their artwork, but the extent of indigenous knowledge of paleontology is poorly understood across Africa.
Further research into indigenous cultures might shed more light on how humans around the world have incorporated fossils into their culture.
“The ethnographic, archaeological, and palaeontological evidence are consistent with the hypothesis that the Horned Serpent panel could possibly depict a dicynodont,” Dr. Benoit said.
“This is supported by: (i) the downward orientation of the tusks on the La Belle France tusked animal, which does not match that of any modern African animals, but does match the tusks of dicynodonts; (ii) the abundance of dicynodont fossils in the area; and (iii) the local San belief into a long extinct, large animal.”
“This would imply that the San may have: (i) discovered dicynodont fossils; (ii) interpreted them as long-extinct species; (iii) made a painting of one of them at La Belle France; and (iv) integrated them into their worldview.”
“If so, this would evidence that Later Stone Age people were aware of dicynodont fossils at least a decade before their formal scientific description by western scientists, and made the first known reconstruction of one of them.”
“Even if one considers that the Horned Serpent panel has a purely spiritual meaning, it does not invalidate the hypothesis that the tusked animal itself may have been imagined based on a dicynodont fossil.”
The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE.
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J. Benoit. 2024. A possible later Stone Age painting of a dicynodont (Synapsida) from the South African Karoo. PLoS ONE 19 (9): e0309908; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309908
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