Take a good look, because this may be the oldest piece of art in the Americas. Archaeologists say it's also our earliest drawing of a human. Of course, when your Pictionary partner has been dead for been ten millennia, no one can tell you you're wrong.
In eastern Brazil, the cave of Lapa do Santo is a deep toy box for anthropologists. It's a long, sloping space that sheltered groups of humans intermittently over 11,000 years of history. The ground is made of wood ash, from human hearths, packed as deep as 13 feet. It's full of graves.
On one of the final days of their expedition, having dug to the very bottom of that ashy floor, a group of Brazilian researchers led by Walter Neves discovered the stickman you see above. He's about a foot tall, chipped out of the rock. I say "he" because that projection on the lower right is, according to the experts, a phallus.
