At Karahantepe, near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Türkiye, human figures carved in stone carry animals on their backs. In these earlier sculptures, people bear the weight, with animals positioned above them.
Most recently, archaeologists found an 11,000-year-old sculpture that seems to challenge that visual narrative, with the leopard bearing the weight of a seated person on its back. Standing 28 inches (70 centimeters) tall, it appears to have stayed on a bench inside a small stone building.
“I believe this discovery, which opens the door to new questions about the earliest periods of human history, will have a wide impact on the scientific community,” culture and tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said in a press release.
Where the Karahantepe Sculpture Was Found
The sculpture came from a building approximately 10 feet (3 meters) across, with flat stones covering the floor. The excavation team uncovered it during Karahantepe’s 2026 excavation season, part of Türkiye’s Heritage to the Future project, a national effort to research and preserve archaeological sites.
Earlier excavations show that Karahantepe’s residents made deliberate choices about how they left buildings. In a 2021 study published in the Turkish Journal of Archaeology and Ethnography, excavation director Necmi Karul reported that every structure uncovered by that point had been filled and sealed after people stopped using it.
Explore All OptionsOther Neolithic communities across Anatolia and the Near East also closed buildings deliberately, although their practices varied. Archaeologists do not yet know whether the new building was closed in the same way, but the earlier examples provide the possibility that the sculpture may have been left in place deliberately.
Read More: 2,000-Year-Old Chinese Rock Art May Have Been Preserved with Blood and Lime
How the New Sculpture Changes an Older Pattern
People and animals already appeared together in earlier art from Karahantepe. A 2022 paper published in Antiquity describes sculptures from the site in which human figures carry animals on their backs.
The authors also compared Karahantepe’s stacked figures with a relief at Sayburç, another Neolithic site in Şanlıurfa. On the wall of a communal building there, human and animal figures appear beside one another rather than one body carrying the other.
Researchers argue that the linked figures at Sayburç may depict connected events or stories that helped communities preserve shared memories. Although their paper was published before the new sculpture was found, the discovery gives archaeologists a third arrangement to consider alongside scenes of figures beside one another and animals carried by humans.
How Karahantepe Fits Into the Stone Hills
Karahantepe sits approximately 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Göbeklitepe, and both belong to Taş Tepeler, or Stone Hills, a group of more than a dozen Neolithic sites in the region, according to Anadolu Agency.
Göbeklitepe first drew archaeological attention in the 1960s, with extensive excavations beginning in the 1990s. Its T-shaped pillars and animal carvings brought international attention to the region. Excavations at Karahantepe began in 2019 and have uncovered structures and artwork from approximately the same period.
Together, the sites preserve a time when communities that had moved across the landscape to hunt and gather food were beginning to settle. They put considerable time and effort into building large stone structures and carving images of humans and animals.
At Karahantepe, one of those carvings remained inside a room only 10 feet wide. Eleven millennia later, the person carved in stone still sits on the leopard’s back.
Read More: This 3,000-Year-Old Pottery May Have Been One of History's First Brands
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from Anadolu Agency: 11,000-year-old sculpture of human figure riding leopard found in Türkiye
- This article references information from the Turkish Journal of Archaeology and Ethnography: Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe
- This article references information from Antiquity: The Sayburç reliefs: a narrative scene from the Neolithic
