Rock art found in South Africa, and painted two centuries ago, represents how the San people imagined extinct animals that they found in fossil form.
This early rendering of these fossils could relate to the lost cultural belief of rain ceremonies and the realm of the dead.
“It’s a combination of what they could see in reality and what they imagined,” says Julien Benoit, a paleontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa as he relates in a study published recently in PLOS ONE.
The Mythical Rock Art Discovered
Benoit first saw a painting by the San people of a creature that appeared semi-mythical in a book dating to the 1910s. Benoit tracked down the farm in South Africa where it was described — the same family still owned the farm — called La Belle France and was pointed in the right direction to find the actual rock art in person.
