Rephotographing the panel shows the San 'dicynodont tusks' are a smear of black paint

The 2024 reading leaned on color. Light gray is typical of the tusks of such an animal, that study said, and the pair on this panel is light gray ^[17]. Witelson went to see the rock himself. "I happened to be on a field trip when the most recent claims were published," he said, "and was able to go visit the original painting," which he rephotographed and digitally enhanced ^[15]. The gray, he reports, is weathering: black paint elsewhere on the same panel still carries an oily film, and where the film has been stripped away the paint looks pale ^[17].

Before the color question there is a provenance question. The 2024 argument rested on a copy of the painting made by George Stow and on information Stow obtained from a San woman named 'Kou'ke ^[11]. Witelson's study describes Stow's images as famously inaccurate, changing positions and colors, with one piece supposedly forged ^[12]. 'Kou'ke's account reached print in English translation, filtered through Stow's own worldview ^[13].

The dinosaur footprint identification has a longer history than its publication date suggests. Ellenberger stumbled on the old paintings in 1930, when he was 12, and recorded the odd red shape as a footprint then ^[8]. The published argument followed 75 years later ^[21]. Witelson finds no songs about ancient footprints and no myths about fossil bones that attach to ǁKhwai-hemm ^[6]. Some other paleontologists have also begun to question the interpretation ^[9].

Both cases come down to whether a supporting story exists anywhere else. Myths pass between people and across generations, so a tradition about giant tusked beasts that once roamed the land ought to surface somewhere in the corpus; Witelson finds it in neither 'Kou'ke's responses to Stow's copies nor any other San myth ^[18]. The rain animal is different. It is a mythical creature the San could hunt to bring rain, documented across rock art and San stories in southern Africa, and Witelson's paper concludes the painting most likely shows one ^[19].

"We all know that digital content spreads very quickly across the internet," Witelson said. "Even so, I was surprised to see just how quickly and widely it spread!" ^[14]

The idea that the San and Basotho noticed dinosaur bones and put them into songs, myths and cave paintings has grown in paleontology for decades ^[20]. This paper does not show that nobody in southern Africa ever noticed a fossil bone; it takes apart two published cases. The wider proposition, as Witelson describes it, 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" ^[3]. "The problem is that there is no actual evidence that Indigenous San people thought about fossils in this way," he said ^[4].