Connect to your computer, go to Google and type the name of a civilization and the word "sexuality" into the Internet and Google will return a multitude of results, based on images garish and scandalous. from Pompeii to the more discreet Mayans and Chinese. The Egyptians had eroticism, as did the sophisticated people of India, the inventors of the Karma Sutra. Today's youth seem to view sexuality as a non-issue, but just 20 years ago, fights nearly broke out in an auditorium during a speech I gave at school on gay rights. Humans have always been fascinated by our own sexuality and we have found different ways to represent this fascination. Hays-Gilpin states that rock art gives us a direct line to ancient beliefs because it is composed of images of things that the creator experienced either through the physical world or through the spiritual world acquired through trance and rituals , in the words of Dr. Kay: “people drew what they saw.” I would expand this belief to encompass art and tools made by early humans, because tools and art objects were created under the same conditions as cave art. Scholars have long viewed gender as a classification based on the individual's biological sex; Because gender was seen as rigid and immutable, it was treated as a non-issue and has, historically, received little attention (Hays-Gilpin 2004). Early Italian scholars often made no distinction between sex and gender, or assumed an individual relationship without recognizing the likelihood of more than two genders; this naive approach to prehistoric sexuality illustrates the general attitudes of the first archeologies of the genre (Whitehouse 2001). Recent studies have shown that gender identities vary much more than in middle of paper....... Like the colonial era and the invention of the concept of race, sexuality has become a means for modern human men to justify injustices and inequalities to others. In recent history, media reports have reported on the first openly gay football player in the NFL, as well as an attempt by the Arizona legislature to "legalize discrimination against homosexuals." A wise woman told me that women are not equal in this country as long as there is a law guaranteeing equality; laws can be made and remade, so to be truly equal, all parties must agree. Until humanity progresses in research and stops making assumptions based on gender or perceived sexuality, assumptions about who did what and why may never be fully understood, but through that same recognition, I believe that we can better understand our ancestors, and by proxy, ourselves.