Türkiye: new archaeological discoveries dating back twelve millennia

These are the discoveries of a lifetime, the coronation of fifteen years of excavations. With relish, Professor Necmi Karul reveals the seated stone man, gripping his penis with both hands, a vulture at his feet. This stone statue, more than 2.30 m high, seated on a bench decorated with a leopard, was discovered at the end of September in the south-east of Turkey, at the heart of a complex of around twenty sites which was home to thousands of humans during the Stone Age, twelve thousand years ago. By stirring the yellow sand and turning over the limestone stones of Karahantepe, Professor Karul, director of the prehistory department at Istanbul University, came across this statue overturned and broken into three pieces, which he found virile attributes in the middle of the scree.

Karahantepe, excavated since 2019, belongs to the network of Neolithic sites identified around the hill of Göbekli Tepe, considered the “capital” of this ensemble, a sort of Mecca visible from all the other settlements studied by the Tas Tepe project (the Hills of rock). For Professor Karul, who coordinates the work at Tas Tepe, these settlements bear witness to a “new social order born after the ice age”. The man was lying in one of the first rectangular buildings of which he was probably a pillar supporting the wooden roof. “We had already found similar ones but this is the first time that we have found his phallus,” says the archaeologist who still hopes to unearth his nose.

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The first chaste photos of the statue published by the Ministry of Culture led the Turkish press to suspect “censorship” on the part of the authorities, embarrassed by this majestic virility. “It’s just that we hadn’t yet found the missing phallus,” laughs the archaeologist. “Each time they abandoned a building, after 400 or 500 years of occupation, their contemporaries overturned the pillars and statues after having carefully broken their noses and phallus,” he explains. Then the site was filled in, buried under tons of sand and earth. And rebuilt not far away. Its function remains unknown - as does that of the main arena and the reasons for their abandonment.

The largest room, 20 m in diameter, surrounded by smaller rooms, seems to constitute a sort of agora, a gathering place accessed by a reduced passage, supported by a forest of phallus-shaped pillars topped with a man's head carved out of the rock and animal figures: fox, snake, leopard... “Those who entered here knew the symbol, they told them a story. Then they began to place men at the center of their world,” notes the professor who did not find any female figures.

Perhaps they were made of wood, more vulnerable, he ventures. These assemblies of some 200 people undoubtedly corresponded to a form of “animist or shamanic ritual, something new for humanity,” he continues. But, “it is too early to talk about religion” among these last hunter-gatherers who, for the first time, settled and remained there for nearly 1,500 years.

“Around the site, we found around a hundred traps: they began to domesticate wild animals” at the same time as they embarked on the first forms of agriculture, as evidenced by the presence of grains of wheat. Professor Karul had barely enjoyed his meeting with the man from Karahantepe when he found himself caught up in another unprecedented discovery, in the same week at Göbekli Tepe. On this site which dominates Mesopotamia, in the north of the fertile crescent, carefully studied since 1997, archaeologists came face to face with a polychrome wild boar 1.20 m long, 70 cm high: housed in a niche, it probably faced another at the end of the site - not yet excavated.

With red eyes and teeth, a black and white body, this 11,000-year-old wild pig is “the first colored sculpture from this period discovered to date”. It took renovation work on the stone and sand walls to reveal it. Which still suggests other surprises to come: the places were occupied for around 1,500 years before being abandoned. Of the twenty sites of the Tas Tepe project, which stretches 120 km long, not far from the Syrian border, Turkish archaeologists and their German, Italian, Bulgarian and Japanese peers have started to excavate nine.

“Work for the next 150 years”, rejoices Professor Karul who decided that the man and the wild boar would both remain where they came out of the ground - after the necessary precautions to save them.