In Siberia, whence most of our information comes, many carcasses of these huge animals have been found preserved entire in the frozen mud. When and how did they perish? Possibly, says the geologist, all at once, overwhelmed by some sudden cataclysm, which, burying the carcasses in the mud, was immediately followed by an intense cold that has lasted ever since; possibly, again, great freshets in the northern rivers, overtaking the migrating herds, swept their carcasses from warmer regions to the shores of the Polar Sea.
In Europe, the fact that the mammoth survived into the human period was proved some years ago by the discovery of human stone implements associated with mammoth bones in the river gravels of the Somme Valley, France, and in the Virgin Cave at Brixham, South Devon, England; but more interesting still, was the discovery of prehistoric carvings of the great elephant, sketches from nature made by the "cave-men," and found in their subterranean dwellings along the river Dordogne in France, illustrations of which will be given in the following pages.
In America, we have traces of a race of savages as old or older than the now famous river-drift and cave-men of Europe. Since the "Calaveras Man" lived, a valley, say geologists, has been metamorphosed, by the slow processes of nature, into a mountain; and the "San Joachim plummet," the "Trenton gravel-flints," and stone implements from the gold-bearing gravels of California, all speak of a race of human beings who must have lived in the time of the hairy mammoth.
But who were these people? Were they Indians? or had the Indian or his ancestor the mound-builder not yet appeared? and how many thousands or tens of thousands of years ago did they exist? These are questions which archæology has not yet answered.
Here, however, with the carving before us we need not go back so far, nor beyond the Indian as we know him--the fierce, roving, bauble-loving, picture-making hunter of to-day. A study of the wonderful outlines on the stone will lead us through a period of his history extending over many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before the coming of Columbus; and here we may try to read, from the few vestiges of this time that chance has preserved to us, fragments of his picturesque mythology, strange legends of his origin and wanderings over a forest-covered continent, and the thrilling story of the mound-builders, and of long wars when the forest soil for centuries was a "dark and bloody ground."[D]