Karahan Tepe's Newest Chamber Has Archaeologists Terrified — Here's Why

A bearded stone head watches a chamber at Karahan Tepe from a wall it was never mounted on, because it was carved out of the wall, and the eleven pillars it is watching are the floor. The builders cut downward around each one until they stood free, so there is no joint and no socket, just continuous stone from floor to tip. In this one I go through what five percent of that hilltop has produced. The Great Ellipse, twenty three metres across, with buttresses over four metres high carved from living bedrock and leopard pelt loincloths matching the ones at Göbekli Tepe forty six kilometres away. A seated figure two point three metres tall with countable ribs and individually carved fingers. A T-shaped pillar found in October twenty twenty five with an actual face, which after thirty years of debate settles what those pillars were meant to be. And a human riding a leopard, announced in twenty twenty six, which reverses every other depiction of that animal in the Neolithic record. Then the part nobody can explain. The statues were decapitated deliberately, the heads set at their own feet and turned to face the wall, and only then was everything buried in carefully layered fill. The people who made these things killed them first.
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