An 11,000-Year-Old Statue of a Human Riding a Leopard Has Been Unearthed in Turkey

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have unearthed an approximately 11,000-year-old statue of a human figure seated on the back of a leopard, Turkish culture and tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced on 28 August 2026.

The 70-centimetre-tall sculpture was found at Karahantepe, one of a cluster of remarkably early Neolithic settlements near the city of Şanlıurfa. It was discovered on a bench running along the wall of a three-metre-wide structure whose floor was paved with flat stones, according to The Art Newspaper.

The find came during the 2026 summer excavation season, conducted under a Turkish government programme called Heritage for the Future. Ersoy shared the announcement via his official social media account.

The statue was carved from a local limestone native to the Şanlıurfa region, according to archaeologist Ergun Lafli, a professor at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir. Lafli told The Art Newspaper that the sculpture is one of the very earliest pieces of evidence for religion and cult in the ancient Near East — the broad term scholars use for the civilisations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant.

A second composite work from the same site makes the new find less isolated than it might seem. Lafli noted that the newly found statue is the second composite sculpture uncovered at Karahantepe; the first, found in 2021, depicted a large cat perched on a man's shoulders. Anadolu Agency, Turkey's state wire, had reported separately that three-dimensional human statues, a leopard statue and Neolithic-period jewellery were among earlier discoveries at the site, and that some of these objects went on public display for the first time in November 2025.

What makes this particular statue stand out is the pose. Elizabeth Carter, professor emerita of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Art Newspaper that a human figure mounted on an animal is, to her knowledge, unique — no parallel has been documented from this period.

Leopards do appear elsewhere in the ancient Anatolian record. Anadolu Agency has reported that the oldest evidence of leopards living in Anatolia comes from the wall paintings of houses at Çatalhöyük, another Neolithic site, several hundred kilometres west of Karahantepe. But those are flat motifs rendered in pigment. The Karahantepe statue is fully three-dimensional, carved in the round from a single block of stone.

Dating the sculpture precisely remains an open question. Lafli cautioned that calibrated and uncalibrated radiocarbon dating — the standard method for converting raw carbon-14 measurements into calendar ages — has not yet been fully presented in scholarly publications for the site. More research on the chronology, he said, is crucial.

For now, the statue adds a vivid and unexpected image to what was already one of the most closely watched archaeological landscapes in the world. The Neolithic settlements around Şanlıurfa, which include the famous site of Göbekli Tepe, have spent the past two decades rewriting the timeline of when humans began building monumental sculpture and communal architecture. A person riding a leopard, carved from local limestone before farming had fully taken hold in the region, now joins that record.