You never know what might be hiding at the bottom of your garden. On a good day in New York, it may be a rusty safe crammed full of gold and diamonds. On a not so great one in Australia, it could be 102 venomous snakes.
And on an unassuming morning in 2020 among the foothills of Turkey’s eastern Taurus Mountains, it was a prehistoric human settlement brimming with millennia-old mysteries.
For the villagers of Sayburç, it turned out the strange T-shaped stones that had been so useful in the construction of their garden walls were, in fact, pillars resembling abstract humans, structures synonymous with the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer people that carved them roughly 11,000 years prior.
After the pillars were identified by staff from the nearby Şanlıurfa Museum, excavation began in earnest the following year and new discoveries have emerged at a relentless pace ever since, shedding new light on a Neolithic age that marked the dawn of a settled human lifestyle.
As of 2026, roughly 70 Neolithic structures have been unearthed in Sayburç, a tightly packed mixture of dwellings and communal buildings where ancient humans lived, died and — based on the presence of stone basins and grinding equipment — processed grain and potentially made beer in one of the earliest-known villages.
Yet arguably no finding has captured imaginations quite like one of the first to be unearthed at the site: five figures carved on a stone bench within one of the settlement’s five communal buildings.
From left to right, a bull is depicted from the side, its huge horns — chiseled as if looking from above — pointing toward the onlooking form of a slightly squatted male figure. His six- fingered left hand is raised, while his right grips some kind of object.
It is the other man on his right, however, that stands out. The only figure carved in high relief, bulging eyes and thick lips face toward the room, seemingly unbothered by the two giant leopards — tails curled and jagged teeth visible — inches away on either side.
Taken together, it represented the earliest known carved stone depiction of a narrative “scene,” Istanbul University archaeologist and site excavation lead Eylem Özdoğan explained in a 2022 research paper, published in the academic journal Antiquity.
While other Neolithic sites around Şanlıurfa province, known collectively as Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills), feature similar architectural techniques and iconography, none have examples of the horizontal format of a progressive, linked story.
“If you look at the region, especially Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe, you will see all these figures as individual depictions,” Özdoğan told CNN’s Erica Hill. “But here you see them in relation. They are pieces of a story.”
What the actual plot of that story is though, remains a mystery. That’s not to say there has been a shortage of theories: Özdoğan has gathered as many as she can from professionals and amateurs alike in recent years.
Some have interpreted the scene as simply a dramatic retelling of encounters between man and beast, pointing to the prominence of the bull’s horns and the attacking stances of the leopard pair. Others have taken that reading further as depicting a rite of passage, of individuals facing down mighty animals as a form of initiation or coming-of-age test.
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Concepts of fertility and continuity have also been inferred. The male figure between the leopards grips an emphasized erect penis in his right hand, leading some modern scholars to read a pre-farming tale of survival and virility. Phallic imagery is found across Taş Tepeler; Karahan Tepe’s so-called Pillar Room depicts 10 upright pillars carved in phallic form.
As the leading authority on Sayburç, Özdoğan doesn’t cling to one hypothesis. While she welcomes the various readings, she ultimately has little interest in theorizing the exact narrative.
“Everybody has different stories, different imaginations, about what they see on the reliefs,” she explained. “I think all of them are right and have some kind of truth in it, but it is not possible to know the exact story they were representing.”
“It is important for me as an archaeologist how those stories worked for them … To know the real story is not really important for me. Maybe it is because I will never know it.”
For Özdoğan, the implications of how important the reliefs were for the community that carved them are ample cause for intrigue. They represent the collective memory and values of a people finding its feet during the transition to a more sedentary life, the archaeologist explained, displayed publicly for all to see.
With little distinction between public and private life, Özdoğan sees the reliefs as the “glue” that helped bind these early societies together.
“I believe that they had many rules about life and daily activities. Everything was decided — nobody could just do whatever they liked,” she said.
“To follow all these conditions, they needed a kind of strong discourse. I think the relief is describing such a perspective about daily life and beliefs.”
A host of other discoveries have followed at Sayburç, with the Neolithic remains comprehensively complete despite some damage incurred during later Roman settlement and the establishment of a modern village in the mid-20th century.
The relationship of the site’s earliest settlers to death has been an ongoing source of fascination. The dead were often buried within inhabited dwellings, excavations revealed, sometimes beneath the floor in careful arrangements, suggesting that the deceased endured as parts of the household. Last year, a small carved figure apparently depicting a deceased person with their mouth seemingly sealed , stitched or closed shut, was uncovered.
In some places, animal bones were mixed with human bones. Combined with the repeated imagery of scavenging birds across Taş Tepeler — most notably a pillar at Göbekli Tepe depicting a vulture beside a headless human body — it has led some to theorize whether the burials point to an intentional process of excarnation, whereby scavengers were offered the dead’s flesh as part of a wider “sky burial” funeral practice.
Pillars have similarly served as a rich vein of intrigue, not least the T-shaped structures dotted around — and even within — Sayburç’s Neolithic dwellings. Often featuring carved arms and belts, the stones have been interpreted as anthropomorphic structures that were possibly treated as human-like.
One pillar in a distinct building at the center of the village features a carved human face at its bedrock base. With the pillar directly opposite a large niche set into the wall and neighbored by other pillars featuring carvings of a leopard and a pig, Özdoğan sees the room arrangement as deliberate, even if the exact story remains elusive.
“We can see that the public art is more visible than the other regions … this shows us that they want to show their tradition in a visible way,” she said.
“They are oral cultures, so they cannot pass the norms and the traditions by writing. They pass all these traditions by words and stories. This probably helped them to remember the stories, what they need to know, and transmit it to new generations.”
To help ensure those stories continue to be told, Özdoğan is currently involved in a plan to turn the Sayburç site into an open-air museum.
“This will help save the settlement for the future,” Özdoğan said. “It’s a really unique thing to see.”
