A 200-year-old cave painting from South Africa, created by the region's earliest inhabitants, the San people, seems to illustrate an animal that went extinct over 200 million years ago. This long-bodied creature, known as a dicynodont (meaning "two-toothed dog"), had downward-curving tusks and resembled a warm-blooded lizard. It inhabited the area before dinosaurs appeared and became extinct at the end of the Triassic period.
If the artwork found on the Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France (located in the Free State Province of South Africa) indeed depicts this extinct species, it would have been created at least a decade prior to the first recognized scientific classification of a dicynodont. This painting would also lend support to the idea that the San people wove the fossils of extinct animals into their cultural practices, myths, and art.
“This research demonstrates that the San hunter-gatherers, the first inhabitants of southern Africa, encountered fossils, made sense of them, and included them in their rock art and belief system,” stated Julien Benoit, lead researcher from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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