What the analysis found
Working through the previous season's material in the lab and archive, the Karahan Tepe team has built up a picture of the local diet around 12,000 years ago. The headline is gazelle: strong evidence that the people here relied heavily on gazelle meat as their main source of protein.
Project director Prof. Necmi Karul notes the same signal appears at neighbouring Göbekli Tepe — though Göbekli's animal remains span a wider range of species from different ecological zones. Karahan's meat diet looks, so far, more narrowly focused on gazelle.
The surprise: legumes, not grain
The plant side is where the team was caught out. They had expected grain to dominate, as it tends to in the usual story of the early Neolithic. Instead, legumes — the pulses, the bean-and-lentil family — turned out to hold a significant place.
'We initially assumed grain consumption,' Karul said, 'but we observed that legumes held a significant place in the diet.' It points to a mixed, possibly seasonal food strategy: hunting gazelle, and gathering or tending pulses, well before farming as we usually picture it.
It is a useful corrective. The people who raised Karahan Tepe's pillars were not simple hunters scraping by — they were feeding a community on a considered, varied diet.
Why it matters
Monuments get the attention, but a site is also a place where people ate every day. Knowing that Karahan's builders lived on gazelle and legumes puts ordinary life back into a place we usually discuss in terms of ritual and symbolism.
It also feeds a live debate: whether these communities were still hunter-gatherers, early cultivators, or something in between. A legume-heavy plant diet is exactly the kind of evidence that sits in that grey zone.
What is uncertain
This is preliminary, comparative work on one season's material, reported through the press rather than in a published faunal or archaeobotanical study. The species lists, quantities, and methods are not public yet. Karul has said the team will 'expand this data further in the coming season'.
Read it as a strong first sketch, not a final account.