An Exceptional 11,000-Year-Old Sculpture Depicting a Man on a Leopard Found in Karahantepe

Release from Turkish government (in turkish)

Excerpt:

The Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, has announced the discovery of an archaeological piece of singular value during the excavation work being carried out at the Karahantepe site, corresponding to the 2026 campaign. It is a composite sculpture, 70 centimeters in height, depicting a human figure seated on the back of a leopard, and its chronology is placed at around eleven thousand years before the present. 

Ersoy himself specified that the piece was found exactly where it had been deposited in that remote era, inside a circular structure three meters in diameter that preserved its original flat-slab pavement and a continuous bench attached to the perimeter wall, on which the piece rested.

Excavations in Karahantepe, which began in 2019, have yielded significant findings each season, and 2026 has been no exception, as new buildings and objects have come to light that expand knowledge about the region’s first sedentary communities. 

Minister Ersoy emphasized that the recovered sculpture presents a compositional style that had not been documented in previous archaeological records, adding an extra layer of interest to an already remarkable discovery.