Animal hand or foot stencils are not as common as human ones in the rock art record. Emu foot stencils are evidenced in the Carnavon Gorge and the Tent Shelter in Australia, choike/nandu (birds of thegenus Rhea) stencils in the rock art of La Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, bird stencils in Arnhem Land in Australia (Taçon et al., 2008), among others. All these animal stencils are made with tridactyl feet. As such, as far as we know, the Wadi Sūra II shelter would represent the first record ever identified of non-human pentadactyl hand stencils in the world rock art.
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The varan is an animal associated with a strong symbolic universe amongst Saharan and Sahelian populations, who represented it in rock art (Souville, 1991; Réganon, 1978). For André Jodin, “the sacred nature of this animal for the [subactual] Libyan populations is undoubtful” (Jodin, 1964). Varans appear as protective animals to which various functions are assigned: chthonian animals related to the founding
of the villages and to origins in general, protective or apotropaic body partsworn asamulet by the Tuaregs, etc. Crocodiles are also linked to old-established beliefs about creation, destruction or regeneration,
mainly recorded in the Nile Valley. Both animals have not yet been identified by archaeology – whether in rock art or by bone remains – in the Gilf el-Kebir.
Whereas other shelters of the region mostly display scenes of everyday life (pastoralism, hunting),Wadi Sūra II is host to numerous paintings whose content is more obviously symbolic, such as composite beasts. The presence of animal stencils in this particular shelter suggests that they could have been done in the context of paintings expressing beliefs related to nature. The particular layout of the pair of tiny hands in the pair of human hands seem to indicate a close – if not fusional – connection between animals and human, in the generic sense of the term (Fig. 2). Our identification of the use of an animal (most probably a reptile) hand or forefoot as a stencil in the rock art of Wadi Sūra is a significant discovery that sheds a new light on the symbolic universe of the Early Holocene populations from the Eastern Sahara.