A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
67 comments
·October 7, 2025j-kent
vidarh
I read this comment before clicking, and half expected it to be sarcasm exactly because of how common that is
stronglikedan
I haven't opened the article yet, since I usually check the top comments to see if it's worth the click, but my first thought when clicking through to the comments was, "this damn article better have pictures for once".
infecto
My first exact same thoughts. Every time there is some interesting discovery it’s often with only a single photo or none and a huge wall of text. Pictures speak louder than words in this case.
I kept scrolling though multiple articles as they seem to have a format type for these types of articles where its numbers a small paragraph and a high quality photo. Simply love it.
MomsAVoxell
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on.
At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be the ideal device to teach kids to swim - and so on. It's such a fascinating human discovery - the mind serious wanders.
I encourage anyone who is new to this subject to let the imagination run wild. What kinds of people could create these T-shaped pillars, carve them, use them in their building construction .. and then some day, decide to cover it all up with rubble and stone, to be buried for millennia and discovered by some strange, future civilisation.
It makes me wonder what, 12,500 years from now, of our own crazy civilisation might be unearthed, and strange new utility assigned to their purposes ..
itopaloglu83
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it.
What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.
Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.
AlotOfReading
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research.
To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.
itsnowandnever
it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy
dismalaf
> north Africa
Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements.
> other civilization cradles.
Because people still live there and built on top.
Tuna-Fish
The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved.
I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found.
(Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)
alephnerd
> why did these hills survive
Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.
sethammons
These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.
pwillia7
I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it.
I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools.
I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.
When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.
This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
clickety_clack
I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.
itsnowandnever
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian.
definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
pwillia7
Agree and good point -- do we know how long the Tepes took to build?
card_zero
The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
itopaloglu83
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks.
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
ch4s3
> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities
Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
pwillia7
I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
ahmeneeroe-v2
Not defending alt-archaeology, but there is a major difference between precision of construction and volume of construction.
acuozzo
> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff
Links?
pwillia7
This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined
baq
not OP but this guy is a fun read, heavy conspiracy vibes, but never going full wacko: https://theethicalskeptic.com/2023/02/02/karahan-tepe-and-th... (that said there are more wacko and less wacko pieces there, you have been warned)
itsnowandnever
I wouldn't call these guys civilization. the Tepe sites are more like an ancient UN for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers than a settlement. they visited seasonally for a feast and then left. the only evidence we have is that they were partying. but they had no social organization at all
funnily enough, the lack of neolithic culture, social hierarchy, or permanent sedentary lifestyle (all hallmarks of "civilization") and all archeological evidence suggests they were much healthier and more peaceful than neolithic humans. that's why people link "Garden of Eden" mythology originating in ancient Sumeria to the ancient peoples' observation that people became "civilized" but at what cost since it made humans less healthy, more violent, and presumably less happy due to the novel concept of social inequality
fidotron
The sphinx weathering is odd but it's the Osireion that is a total anomaly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osireion
You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.
triyambakam
I think it's really exciting. It seems like we always assume technology advances linearly (even with valid counter examples).
card_zero
Or a more boring theory about the sphinx is that it was constructed at the orthodox time, around 2550 BC, and then later on it rained sometimes. This would be mildly surprising, as opposed to very surprising.
stevage
> The face of the beprenese is located at the top of the Dikili stone; its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt shape nose, and a similar style with human statues found in Karahantepe. This discovery reveals not only the technical mastery of Neolithic people, but also the way he expresses himself and the ability to think abstractly.
I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.
k310
I didn't get english. Just lucky?
https://www-trthaber-com.translate.goog/foto-galeri/karahant...
fatihpense
Thanks, I can't change the url now. Since it is just a gallery with minimal information, I forgot to submit translated url.
altairprime
You can email the mods to change it if you like!
metalman
infiniscroll turkish archiology, which only seems right given the 12k years of human building
mjd
That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like.
They must think we're stupid.
Liquix
they have played us for absolute fools
sethammons
I don't get your joke
throwmeaway222
I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.
dooglius
I wonder if it's possible to correct for the effects of time to see what it originally looked like
AlotOfReading
Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy. I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
bee_rider
> Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy.
Why throw interdisciplinary shade?
> I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected? If there’s no indication of paint residues, they can look for other clues of course. But, without any other evidence, what’s the alternative, right? Guessing would be bad, don’t want to mislead people.
AlotOfReading
It's not interdisciplinary. I'm an archaeologist, albeit not practicing these days.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected?
But just to highlight some knowledge gaps, it's usually not clear what damage was caused during the backfill process, what the exposure conditions for these pillars were during their lifetimes (e.g. roof or not, though these earlier rectangular rooms are generally agreed to have covered with wooden beams), and even the dating is a bit suspect in this area.
Plus, the relevant team may not even have a LIDAR scanner to do that properly as that's fairly specialist equipment. Etc.
Getting to the point where it's possible and reasonable isn't easy.
card_zero
What pigments did they have 12 thousand years ago? Only ochre, surely? So rusty red, dirty yellow, nothing else? (Oh, soot black, too.) I'd be interested if there was anything else.
I see the boar statue is painted inside its mouth ... with red ochre.
AlotOfReading
The boar was painted with red inside the mouth, and black/white on the hide. Black in the ancient Near East was usually bitumen, though later groups like the Egyptians would switch to manganese dioxide. White was plaster. They also had yellow ochre.
fatihpense
From the article: "The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped pillars found in and around Göbekli Tepe have long reinforced the idea that these stones symbolized humans. This new find at Karahan Tepe, the first to feature a human face carved into a T-shaped pillar, is considered a turning point in Neolithic research."
dr_dshiv
Is that the oldest known carved megalithic stone statue of a person?
AlotOfReading
Keyword "megalith". We have older carved statues. We have older carved, stone statues. We have older, carved stone statues depicting people, as well as statues from this same site that are full body.
It's from basically the same period and culture as urfa man, but at a site that's been initially dated a few hundred years earlier and is generally understood to have been inhabited first. It's contemporaneous with the famous T-pillars at Gobekli Tepe. The important thing is that this is the first T-pillar discovered with a human face, aside from the one with just a human outline.
holoduke
12000 years ago is long, but also not very long. Just a few 500 grandfather's ago. Amazing what we achieved in that short timespan.
phendrenad2
By "human face" they mean nose and eyebrow ridge clearly indicating a face, and most likely human.
Can I just say that it is fantastic that they have included so many detailed pictures of the obelisk. How many times have you visited an article about a discovery only to have no pictures in the article.