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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;clutteredcloset49, post: 33690, member: 85&quot;]The figure looks South American to me.&nbsp; </p><p>I was trying to find if elephants were ever brought over for working the rainforests.&nbsp; Instead found mention on several sites that elephants are used in artwork.&nbsp; Here is an excerpt from one site:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.jasoncolavito.com/american-elephant-myths.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.jasoncolavito.com/american-elephant-myths.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jasoncolavito.com/american-elephant-myths.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>About 3/4s of the page down:</p><p><i>In Mexico there are many indications that elephants were known to the ancient inhabitants. Some of the bas-reliefs of Palenque figured by Waldeck are very strikingly like elephants, and the resemblance can hardly be the result of accident or coincidence. Close to an ancient causeway near Tezcuco, in what may have been the ditch of the road, an entire mastodon skeleton was found, which &quot;bore every appearance of having been coeval with the period when the road was used.&quot; Humboldt reproduces a figure from a Mexican manuscript representing a human sacrifice, and says of it: &quot;The disguise of the sacrificing priest presents a remarkable and apparently not accidental resemblance to the Hindoo Ganesa [the elephant-headed god]. . . . Had the peoples of Aztlan derived from Asia some vague notions of the elephant, or, as seems to me much less probable, did their traditions reach back to the time when America was still inhabited by these gigantic animals, whose petrified skeletons are found buried in the marly ground on the very ridge of the Mexican Cordilleras?&quot; </i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>Taken altogether, the evidence from tradition and art is strongly in favor of the view that the ancestors of existing American races knew these monstrous animals familiarly. Undoubtedly there is much of fable and absurdity in their legends, but there is something in these tales that is very like truth.</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I think your item is a modern piece of sculpture.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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