What was found
At a briefing held at the Karahan Tepe visitor centre on 26 November 2025, Türkiye's Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, revealed finds from the fifth year of the Taş Tepeler project. Among them were two human faces from Sefertepe, carved onto neatly dressed stone blocks — one in high relief, one in low relief. From the same area came a small black serpentinite bead carved with a human face on each side.
Reports place the faces at roughly 10,000–12,000 years old. As with any active dig, exact dating will firm up as the material is studied and published.
Why it matters
The striking thing is the style. The cheeks, brows and noses of the Sefertepe faces don't quite match the faces known from Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe or Sayburç — which suggests Sefertepe had developed its own local way of carving a face within the shared Taş Tepeler world.
That is exactly the pattern this whole region keeps revealing: not one central sanctuary with satellites, but a network of communities, each with its own hand, all working through the same deep questions about the human face, the body, and the dead.