'Little Horny Man' Rock Carving Oldest in Americas

A stick figure found in a Brazilian cave can lay claim to not only the age record, but also some considerable endowment.

Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest rock carving in the Americas – a rough stick figure with a, umm, disproportionately sized phallus – in a cave in Brazil. The figure, nicknamed "Little Horny Man", dates back to somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 years ago, making it the oldest instance of rock art on this side of the Atlantic. The figure was found during an excavation in a cave in central-eastern Brazil, not far away from where archaeologists discovered Luzia Woman, an 11,500-year-old skeleton believed to be the oldest in South America. The cave engraving, while first discovered in 2009, was only just dated recently. It's believed that Little Horny Man might have been used in fertility rituals, owing to his oversized penis – it's the same size as one of the figure's arms, which, whoo boy, shows that even the earliest residents of the Americas had pretty outsized imaginations.