Among living races the Innuit of Alaska, within three degrees of Behring’s Strait, are skilful carvers in ivory. They chiefly use the teeth of the Beluga, a small white whale common in their seas, and from this they carve birds, fish, seals, deer, and other animals, as well as bodkins, needles, awls, and other implements, with considerable skill. They obtain the walrus tusks in barter from more northern tribes; and from those they make fish-spears, harpoons, and other larger implements. They also amuse themselves with graving, on plates of bone or ivory, dances, hunting-scenes, and other familiar incidents. Of the latter, Mr. W. H. Dall remarks, in his interesting narrative of _Alaska and its Resources_: “These drawings are analogous to those discovered in France, in the caves of Dordogne.”[48] They are so, in so far as both are attempts at representing contemporary animal life by untutored man; but the accompanying illustrations of Innuit art show how greatly the work of the modern savage draughtsman falls short of that of the artist of the Mammoth epoch of Europe. [Illustration: FIG. 40.—Hunter’s Tally Deer’s-horn.] Fortunately our knowledge of the men of that remote era is supplemented by evidence of a still more direct kind. In 1868 the construction of a railroad led to the removal of an extensive talus on the left bank of the river Vézère, at Cro-Magnon, exposing a cave, or shallow recess in the face of the rock, within which were found a succession of strata, with traces of the action of fire, and including flint scrapers, bone bodkins, arrow-points, and other implements, along with bones of the _Elephas primigenius_, _Felis spelæa_, the reindeer, fossil-horse, and ivory tablets and tynes of deer-horn, marked with a series of notches, supposed to be hunters’ tallies recording the produce of the chase. One of the latter, interesting as an illustration of these earliest efforts at numerical notation, is shown in Fig. 40. But most valuable of all were the human skeletons, including those of an old man, a woman, and portions of others of two young men, and a child. Beside them lay nearly three hundred marine shells, chiefly the _Littorina littorea_, some perforated teeth, and—as if to determine the era of the Troglodytes of Cro-Magnon,—several implements made of reindeer horn.