This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For decades, an idea has grown in paleontology that, long before scientists began digging up and reconstructing dinosaur bones, the Indigenous San and Basotho in southern Africa noticed them too, incorporating them into songs, myths and immortalizing them on cave walls. But under closer scrutiny, these claims begin to crumble.
A paper published in Southern African Humanities by David Witelson of the University of Oxford says these claims rest on shaky ground. Two cases in particular, involving claims about an all-consuming dinosaur-like monster and an ancient dicynodont-inspired tusked creature, likely depict a personified veld fire and an illusion created by two separate images. The claim that some paleontologists are making is that "local people might also have encountered fossil dinosaur bones but, in the absence of scientific knowledge about dinosaurs, those people would simply have interpreted the fossils as the bones of a mythical monster or dragon," Witelson said.
"The problem is that there is no actual evidence that Indigenous San people thought about fossils in this way." Witelson hones in on two such claims: The first came in 2005 from paleontologist Paul Ellenberger and his colleagues. They argued that an odd red shape depicted a dinosaur footprint, much like those littering the mountains today, and that Indigenous people tried to reconstruct the bird-like creature that made them. The team suggested that it was the mythical being known to 19th-century ǀXam as ǁKhwai-hemm.
But ǁKhwai-hemm was no giant monster, much less a dinosaur, the new study said. No songs exist about ancient footprints and no myths about fossil bones that could be linked to ǁKhwai-hemm. Digging deeper, Witelson consulted the manuscripts in the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection, which record the ǀXam San stories about ǁKhwai-hemm.
In them, ǁKhwai-hemm is a personified veld fire who burns all in his path after being tricked by the mantis-god ǀKaggen. He is no monster, nor a dinosaur. Ellenberger's interpretation likely began nearly 100 years ago.
As a 12-year-old boy in 1930, he stumbled upon and recorded the old paintings, interpreting the weird red shape as a dinosaur footprint. Today, even some other paleontologists have begun to question his interpretation. In 2024, a bold claim from a scientific article began to circulate on the internet: A San artist had painted a mythological tusked rain animal inspired by the fossil remains of mammal-like creatures called dicynodonts found in the landscape.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
