For generations, certain San rock paintings in southern Africa were claimed to depict dinosaurs and extinct tusked creatures — a romantic notion that researchers have now carefully dismantled. What the paintings actually show are animals and figures rooted in San spiritual and cultural life, rendered through a sophisticated visual tradition developed over centuries. The episode is less a story about prehistoric mystery than about the enduring human tendency to see in others' art a mirror of one's own curiosity, and the quiet cost that tendency exacts on the communities whose heritage is misrea