Archaeologists have uncovered an 11,000-year-old statue of a man clutching his penis — a discovery that could shed new light on a mysterious Neolithic culture.
The statue was found in Karahan Tepe in the Taş Tepeler region of southeast Turkey. The 11,000-year-old site is believed by some to be the oldest Neolithic temple in the world, predating the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by more than 6,000 years.
The statue represents a skeletal man with both hands placed near his phallus, sitting atop a bench adorned with a leopard, per France24.
Finding statues like this is not uncommon, "but for the first time here we found the phallus," said archaeologist Necmi Karul of Istanbul University who uncovered the statue, according to Agence France Presse (AFP).
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Neolithic humans may have been more sophisticated than we thought
This is just the latest discovery from a controversial site that could rewrite what we know about Neolithic culture.
Karahan Tepe, found in the Germuş mountains of south-eastern Turkey near the border with Syria, is part of a sprawling archaeological project called Tas Tepe, comprising a dozen sites including Gobekli Tepe, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The area is known for its plethora of depictions of the male reproductive organ. The Urfa man, a 6.2-foot-tall statue of a man seeming to protect his erect penis with both hands, was notably found nearby.
Karahan Tepe itself is strewn with bizarre scenes, including a room peppered with T-shaped pillars, oddly reminiscent of phalluses, facing a round head sticking out of the rock face, per journalist Sean Thomas, who wrote about his visit to the site for The Spectator in 2022.
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Statues of leopards, foxes, and snakes are also found adorning pillars of the site, per AFP. Some statues of leopards show the predators riding humans or putting their paws over their eyes, per Thomas.
No statues of women have been found at the site, though it's possible these were made out of wood and lost in time, Karul told AFP.
What is clear from the findings at these sites is that hunter-gatherer communities in southwest Asia at the time were a lot more sophisticated than archaeologists had once thought, said Benjamin Arbuckle, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved with the excavations, per Live Science.
The findings of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe over the past 30 years show that they were not the "relatively simple, small in scale, and generally egalitarian," culture they were thought to be, he said.
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What is not clear is what this site was for.
For German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who took the lead on the research in the early 1990s, the site was "the first human-built holy place," he told Smithsonian Magazine in 2008.
He uncovered many t-shaped pillars, statues of animals, some depictions of humans, as well as stone tools characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies. But what he didn't find was evidence that the site was regularly inhabited.
This led him to believe this was a site that people visited occasionally, not built for habitation.
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"'Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history," said Schmidt to Thomas in 2006.
"We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilization: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual center came first, then when enough hunter-gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realized they had to feed people. Which means farming."
Since then, new findings have come to challenge this theory. Digs have started to uncover possible traces of human habitation near the site, Lee Clare, an archaeologist from the German Archaeological Institute, who worked on the dig, told the BBC.
The site, then, could have been a place where hunter-gatherers were trying to grasp their way of life as others were moving slowly toward agriculture, Clare told the BBC.
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The statue guards its mysterious meaning
It's not clear what the statue was meant to represent and how it fits within this mysterious Neolithic culture.
It was found near a smaller statue of a vulture, which could mean it has some connection with death, per a press release accompanying the finding and translated from Turkish.
For Karul, it could be a way that humans at the time were starting to spiritually see themselves at the center of the animal world. For him, this could be a form of shamanistic ritual, though he wouldn't venture as far as calling it a religion, he told AFP.
Ted Banning, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research, thinks the buildings at Karahan Tepe were more likely to be houses than temples.
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So for him, the statue could be "an important ancestor associated with the building in which it was found," he said per Live Science.
"The fact that the figure is clutching its penis is also consistent with this interpretation by potentially symbolizing that this person was the progenitor of a social group, such as a lineage or clan, associated with the building," he said, per Live Science.
Banning noted, however, that "any interpretation of the statue is conjectural at this point," per Live Science.
Regardless of its meaning, the discovery of the statue, alongside another statue representing a boar recently found in Gobekli Tepe "represent the latest spectacular finds from these sites, which are transforming our understanding of pre-agricultural communities," Arbuckle said, per Live Science.
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