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A narrative scene that depicts a man holding his genitals in his hand while fighting off leopards could be one of the earliest of its kind.
The scene is portrayed in a series of stone carvings that were found in 2021 at an 11,000-year-old site in Sayburç, southeastern Turkey.
The interesting findings were subsequently published in the journal Antiquity on December 8, 2022 by lead author and archaeologist at Istanbul University, Eylem Özdoğan.
According to Özdoğan, the carvings are indicative of the ideologies of the people that were inhabiting the region in that time.
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It was on a bench in the ancient ruins of a communal building where the carvings were discovered.
The two panels show people interacting with dangerous animals, with one panel depicting a man holding his penis in his hand while being attacked by leopards from both his left and right side.
The leopards have been carved in an aggressive manner with their mouths open, and teeth bared.
While the other figures have been shown in flat relief, the carving of the human male is the only one to be depicted in high relief.
The second panel instead portrays a squatting male holding what is believed to be a rattle or a snake as he faces a bull.
The scenes are thought to be related to one another as the published paper explains how the horizontal progression of the human and animal figures suggest the stories continue one after the other.
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Özdoğan said that this discovery may mark the first known examples of this kind of scene.
The time period from which these carvings emerged was a significant one for human history as the Neolithic period encompassed the transition to humans gathering to permanent settlements and farming crops.
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