A unique 11,000-year-old statue of a human being sitting on a leopard was unearthed in Karahantepe | World news

Archaeologists excavating Karahantepe, a Neolithic site in Şanlıurfa province, southeast of Türkiye, have discovered a 70-centimeter-high stone sculpture showing a human figure sitting on the back of a leopard. The discovery was announced on August 25, 2026 by Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, as part of the country’s Heritage for the Future archaeological program. The sculpture was found in situ on a stone bench inside a circular structure about 3 meters in diameter, with a floor paved with flat stones. Its composition is particularly unusual because earlier sculptures of human leopards discovered at Karahantepe showed the animals placed on people’s backs rather than beneath them. The newly discovered piece therefore introduces a different arrangement into the site’s established artistic repertoire, adding another example to the remarkable collection of human and animal images produced by communities in southeastern Anatolia more than 11,000 years ago.

How the new statue reverses an earlier human-leopard composition

Karahantepe had already made three sculptures of humans and leopards in which the relationship was visually reversed: the human figure carried the leopard on its back. Instead, the newly discovered sculpture presents the animal beneath the human figure. The difference is significant because it is not simply another representation of the same arrangement. According to the director of the excavation, Professor Necmi Karul, the newly discovered composition had not been previously documented at Karahantepe. The sculpture was recovered from a circular structure with a stone bench along the wall. Its position provides archaeologists with information about how the object was incorporated into the building, although its precise purpose and the meaning of the human-leopard relationship remain uncertain.

Why archaeologists are cautious about interpreting the leopard

Leopards appear repeatedly in the Karahantepe artistic record. Sculptures and reliefs at the site include representations of animals and human figures associated with them, demonstrating that the species occupied an important place in the visual culture of the community. However, that doesn’t mean archaeologists can say for sure what the images represented. The new statue could have had symbolic, social or ritual meaning, but there is currently no direct evidence establishing a specific history or belief behind the composition. The change from a human carrying a leopard to a human sitting on one could indicate a different relationship between the two figures, but that remains an interpretation rather than an established conclusion. Archaeologists therefore continue to describe the sculpture primarily in terms of what can actually be observed, rather than assigning it definitive religious significance.

How Karahantepe fits into the broader landscape of Taş Tepeler

Karahantepe is part of the Taş Tepeler network of prehistoric sites spread across the Şanlıurfa region. The group includes Göbekli Tepe and several other settlements that have transformed researchers’ understanding of Neolithic communities in southeastern Anatolia. The sites contain monumental architecture, carved stone figures and elaborate images of animals dating from the 10th and 9th millennium BC. Together, they show that communities who lived in the region thousands of years before the development of cities were capable of producing large-scale architecture and sophisticated figurative art. Karahantepe has been particularly important because excavations have revealed an extensive collection of human and animal sculptures, including several unusual combinations of the two.

Why the discovery adds another piece to the region’s Neolithic art

Human figures interacting with dangerous animals were not limited to Karahantepe. Related images have been identified at other Taş Tepeler sites, including Sayburç, where a relief depicting humans alongside dangerous animals has provided additional evidence of the importance of human-animal relationships in the region’s early Neolithic art. Karahantepe’s new sculpture adds another variation to that broader visual tradition. Rather than simply repeating an established composition, it presents the human and leopard in a different physical relationship, giving archaeologists another example to compare with previous discoveries from the site. More than 11,000 years old, the sculpture belongs to a period when communities in southeastern Anatolia produced some of the oldest known monumental stone works of art. Its discovery still doesn’t reveal exactly what the human riding the leopard meant to the people who carved it, but it adds a new and rare image to a prehistoric artistic tradition that researchers are still trying to understand.