Karahantepe's new leopard rider inverts the site's older human-carries-animal stacking

A statue of a human with a leopard on their back was previously discovered at Karahan Tepe and is now in the collection of the Sanliurfa Museum.

Jens Notroff, a Neolithic archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute who was not involved in the project, said the newly discovered sculpture "seems to be a mirrored version of the known type of 'animal mounting on top of a human'."

Notroff thinks the Sayburc leopard scene and the new statue may be linked, and said leopards were common feline predators in the region, vigorous and dangerous animals and probably challenging game for skilled hunters, which might have added to their symbolic meaning.

Notroff said the exact meaning of the human-and-leopard motif is unknown but could relate to courage or strength, and that an individual apparently mastering such an animal could be read as a symbol of power and of control over vigour and danger.

Live Science reported that the statue may reflect the culture's fascination with virility and masculinity, according to experts.

The new discovery gives archaeologists a third arrangement to consider alongside scenes of figures beside one another and animals carried by humans.

Karahan Tepe is one of the oldest known villages in the world and was built around 9750 B.C. in Turkey's Urfa (Sanliurfa) province.

Karahantepe sits approximately 30 kilometres (19 miles) from Gobeklitepe, and both belong to Tas Tepeler, a group of more than a dozen Neolithic sites in the region, according to Anadolu Agency.

Excavations at Karahantepe began in 2019 and have uncovered structures and artwork from approximately the same period as Gobeklitepe.

Discover reported that the excavation team uncovered the sculpture during Karahantepe's 2026 excavation season, part of Turkiye's Heritage to the Future project.

A 2022 paper in Antiquity compared Karahantepe's stacked figures with a relief at Sayburc, where human and animal figures appear beside one another rather than one body carrying the other, and argued the linked figures may depict connected events or stories that helped communities preserve shared memories.

In a 2021 study in the Turkish Journal of Archaeology and Ethnography, excavation director Necmi Karul reported that every structure uncovered at Karahantepe by that point had been filled and sealed after people stopped using it.

Archaeologists do not yet know whether the building holding the new sculpture was closed in the same way, though earlier examples raise the possibility that the sculpture was left in place deliberately.

In 2023, archaeologists at Karahan Tepe unearthed an 11,000-year-old statue of a man clutching his penis, which possibly represents an important ancestor.

In 2022, archaeologists at Sayburc in the Urfa region found a carved scene depicting two leopards, a bull and a man grasping his penis.

Gobeklitepe first drew archaeological attention in the 1960s, with extensive excavations beginning in the 1990s.

A round room 3 metres in diameter encloses about 7 square metres of floor.

A founding date of about 9750 B.C. is roughly 11,775 years before the present, so the 11,000-year age given for the statue falls about 775 years later than the site's reported founding.

Neither published account reports a radiocarbon measurement or a stratigraphic phase for the statue itself; the 11,000-year figure is carried by the site's period attribution.

Sustained excavation at Gobeklitepe began about 24 years before excavation at Karahantepe started.

Neither account states whether the new statue and the earlier human-carries-animal sculptures come from the same building or the same occupation phase.