Karoo extends over more than 150,000 square miles from arid South Africa, the place where the soil in the sun maintains larger secrets of dinosaurs. She wanders around her rock apartments and you will see hills of open rocks that look like a giant book.
The “seasons” extend hundreds of millions of years, each of which is packed with fossilized bones and impressions of the forests that have disappeared. For anyone fascinated by the background of life, Caro is irresistible.
A long time before geology students arrived with measurement and plaster tapes, the original families lived between those bumps themselves.
San, sometimes called /xam, was imagined on water holes, drew hunting scenes on the walls of sandstone, and transported tales of changing snakes that fermented thunderstorms.
Their art remains in the shallow caves and structures, seizing every day and very strange.
Dcynodont art drawn in caves
The fossil fame in karoo depends on creatures called DIICYNODONTS- Eat of Plants Connecting Pigge Size, and Maksa and two of the album fangs.
They ruled the blind period for more than 250 million years, before hatching the first dinosaurs.
Since the area is dry and follow -up to the wind, the Dcynodont skulls often erode directly from the hills lines; Passers can discover ivory bone from squares.
It is not difficult to imagine the first shepherds who stumble and weave them in the local science.
San He also left thousands of charcoal and microscopic paintings. Some people appear antelopes and giraffes, while others depict euphoria dances where the therapists slide into the spirit world.
Among the most interesting images on the wall known as the knocked snake plate, which was created between 1821 and 1835.
One of the painted numbers such as the slim crocodile extends, but it displays a pair of fangs that bend towards the ground – there are no live African animal matches.
Figures on the rocky wall
When the researchers classified the painting for the first time, they guessed that the creature might be a spirit of rain. This interpretation is suitable for San’s cosmology, where snakes often control clouds.
However, the legendary animal usually borrows the details from reality: forms of hoofs, curls of the century, or in this case, fangs. The puzzle remained for decades.
A new investigation recently took a different angle.
After carefully comparison the outline drawn with dozens of karoo fossils, note the world of amazing fossils – the shape of the head, the angle of transportation, and the opposite body rates of the typical DICYNODont skeleton.
The artist seems to have apparently painted a fossil skull that is still included in rock music, then combined with the wrong snake trunk.
Searching for answers
The idea acquires power from archeology. The drilling sites near SAN resulted in intermittent stone tools along with fossil fragments that are carried from remote bumps.
This means that people collected ancient bones, perhaps as preserved or rituals.
Oral traditions registered in the late nineteenth century until you talk about the huge monsters that walked once on the ground before “dried land and cracking”. These tales are frequenting the story of the extinction of the fossil registry at the end of the end.
If the artistic painting of the cave really picks up Dikenodont, it precedes the science of official fossils. Western science was first called a kind in 1845, however the suspended snake board ended no later than 1835.
“The painting was manufactured in 1835 at the latest, which means that this DIICYNODONT is filmed at least ten years before the Western scientific discovery and the name of the first Designon by Richard Owen in 1845,” Julian Benoit noted from The University of WhitroverndThe author of this study.
“This work supports [the fact] The first population in South Africa, the makers of San Hunter, discovered fossils, their interpretation and integration into their rocky system and belief. “
Decynodont art decipher
Beenoit and his colleagues photographed the painting under a varying light, and intends to track the outline numbers, and their conformity with the museum samples.
They argue that the relationship is very narrow so that it is not a chance. Their work joins a handful of cases around the world – China, Australia, North America – where the art of indigenous population may double as the oldest portrayal of extinct animals.
The research also weighs on scientists to expand their lenses. The stories of fossil discovery often focus on explorers in Pith helmets, but societies that live alongside the bumps have noticed, collected and wondered about the old bones for thousands of years.
The realization that the inheritance expands the history of excavation science and honoring the knowledge systems that precede universities.
Why any of this issue?
Beyond scientific credit, find calls fresh partnerships. Significant art sites need protection from corrosion, sabotage and mining.
By connecting the panels to fossils, heritage managers can argue in maintaining the entire landscape instead of isolated walls. This approach protects the cultural memory and recorded deep time closed in the nearby layers.
The study also raises questions for teachers. Imagine the guidance of school groups to a shelter where the Dcynodont skull is at the foot of the coated snake.
Students can track a 250 million -year -old clay line to a nineteenth -century brush blow, then to sad tomography checks that reveal the bone microscopic structure.
Such meetings make Earth sciences concrete and show that curiosity in ancient life is a common human feature, not a imported specialization.
How can this art dictynodont?
Evidence that San looked at excavations and drew what they saw doing more than solving the mystery of art. It connects culture, geology and memory over amazing time periods.
In karoo, one can touch the trigon bone, read the pigment path in the nineteenth century, and hear today’s scientists discuss both. Each element enriches others.
The knocked snake plate stands as a calm reminder that the desire to understand the past of our planet did not start in the lecture halls – as someone began to kneel next to a curious rock and began to ask.
The full study was published in the magazine Plos one.
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