What was found
In the 2026 excavation season at Karahan Tepe, part of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 'Heritage for the Future' programme, excavators uncovered a composite sculpture about 70 cm high showing a human figure seated on the back of a leopard. It dates to roughly 11,000 years ago.
It was found in place: resting on a bench that runs along the wall of a small circular building about 3 metres across, its floor paved with flat stones. That findspot matters — the statue was not in rubble or fill, but set on a bench inside a room, where someone in the Neolithic left it.
A person and a predator, fused
Karahan Tepe and its neighbours are full of leopards, and full of human figures, but an image that puts a human directly onto a leopard's back collapses the distance between them. It is not a person hunting a beast or fleeing one; it is a person mounted on one — carried, joined, or identified with it.
What that meant to the people who carved it is unknown, and worth being honest about. But the image belongs to the same world as the Sayburç relief, where a man grips leopards on either side, and the many Taş Tepeler scenes in which humans and dangerous animals are locked together. This is a new, unusually direct statement of that theme.
Why it matters
This is a 2026-season find, announced as it came out of the ground — not a museum piece being re-described. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced it directly, saying: 'I believe this discovery, which opens the door to new questions about the earliest periods of human history, will have a wide impact in the scientific community.'
For a site already known for its carved heads and seated figures, a human-on-leopard sculpture adds a genuinely new composition to the Karahan Tepe repertoire — and a reminder that the ground here is still producing images no one had seen before.
What is uncertain
This is a fresh field announcement, made via the minister rather than through a published report. The height, dating and context are the excavation's initial account and may be refined. No peer-reviewed description exists yet, and the interpretation of the human-and-leopard image is exactly that — interpretation.
We will update this page as the excavation team publishes its own account.