‘Skeuomorph’ is a term used by anthropologists to denote a device or practice that once had a particular functional or symbolic purpose in a given culture, but that in a successor culture loses such significance while being retained as a design motif, decorative element, or for a quite different purpose. As such, it can continue to metamorphose until its origins are hardly recognisable. Much of pre-Dynastic Egypt's African past may be encoded in such skeuomorphic form.

In Dynastic Egypt, the twin ostrich plumes that were part of the elaborate headdresses of both pharaohs and gods constitute a good example. In the pre- Dynastic rock art of the eastern desert, as well as on many funerary urns of the Naqada II culture (recognised as the crucial transitional phase in the emergence of pre-Dynastic Egypt), ostriches clearly had some centrally important symbolic function. Contrasted again and again with boats, they may well have represented one half of a foundational binary symbolism of desert and river, the founding sites of Egyptian civilisation (Wilkinson, 2003). As late as the Fifth Dynasty, the Pyramid Text of Unas or Wenis (ca 2356–2323 BCE), last pharaoh of the dynasty, assigned to the ostrich some crucial after-world function, which might explain the ubiquitous presence of the bird on earlier funerary vases:

That the ostrich had a totemic significance in much other African rock art is a point to which we shall return. Ostriches largely disappeared from the Egyptian iconic vocabulary, but the twin plumes survived.