Archaeologists excavating Karahantepe, a Neolithic site in southeastern Türkiye’s Şanlıurfa province, have uncovered a 70-centimetre-high stone sculpture showing a human figure seated on the back of a leopard. The discovery was announced on August 25, 2026, by Türkiye’s Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy as part of the country’s Heritage for the Future archaeological programme. The sculpture was found in situ on a stone bench inside a circular structure measuring about 3 metres across, with a floor paved with flat stones. Its composition is particularly unusual because previous human-leopard sculptures discovered at Karahantepe showed the animals positioned 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 imagery 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 produced 3 sculptures featuring humans and leopards in which the relationship was visually reversed: the human figure carried the leopard on their back. The newly discovered sculpture presents the animal beneath the human figure instead. The difference is significant because it is not simply another depiction of the same arrangement. According to excavation director Professor Necmi Karul, the newly discovered composition had not previously been documented at Karahantepe. The sculpture was recovered from a circular structure with a stone bench running 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 artistic record of Karahantepe. The site’s sculptures and reliefs include representations of the animals as well as human figures associated with them, showing that the species held an important place in the visual culture of the community. That does not, however, mean archaeologists can confidently say what the imagery represented. The new statue could have carried symbolic, social or ritual significance, but there is currently no direct evidence establishing a specific story or belief behind the composition. The change from a human carrying a leopard to a human sitting on one could potentially 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 a definitive religious meaning.
How Karahantepe fits into the wider Taş Tepeler landscape
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 animal imagery dating to the 10th and 9th millennia BCE. Together, they show that communities living 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 Neolithic art of the region
Human figures interacting with dangerous animals were not limited to Karahantepe. Related imagery has been identified at other Taş Tepeler sites, including Sayburç, where a relief depicting humans alongside dangerous animals has provided further evidence for the importance of human-animal relationships in the region’s early Neolithic art. The new Karahantepe 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 the site’s earlier discoveries. At more than 11,000 years old, the sculpture belongs to a period when communities in southeastern Anatolia were producing some of the earliest known monumental stone art. Its discovery does not yet reveal exactly what the human riding the leopard meant to the people who carved it, but it adds a rare new image to a prehistoric artistic tradition that researchers are still trying to understand.
