A mysterious animal painted on a cave wall in South Africa’s Free State Province has long baffled scientists. Is it a walrus? It looks like one, but there are no such animals in Africa. Some cryptozoologists – people who look for legendary animals like the Loch Ness Monster – have suggested the painting might depict a sabre-toothed cat.
What is known is that the painting was made by the San, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of South Africa’s Karoo region. The San had a profound knowledge of their environment, which they masterfully depicted in their rock art.
What’s often overlooked, though, is that their environment also contained artefacts from an ancient past: the San lived and hunted among fossil footprints, bones, skulls and teeth of long-extinct reptiles. In recent research with my colleagues, we showed that the San discovered dinosaur bones in Lesotho, which borders the Free State. They also painted dinosaur footprints on cave walls.
