"These figures, engraved together to depict a narrative, are the first known examples of such a holistic scene," explained Eylem Özdoğan, author of the paper and archaeologist at Istanbul University, in a statement. "This was a picture of the stories that formed the ideology of the people of that period."
Dating to the 9th millennium BCE, the site in southeastern Turkey is located under a present-day village in Şanlıurfa Province. Excavations beginning in 2021 revealed the area was inhabited with a Neolithic population that was transitioning from being mobile hunter-gatherers to a more sedentary, farming lifestyle with long-term settlements throughout the region.
"The process of Neolithisation brought with it substantial changes to the cycle of daily life, subsistence strategies and technology, but perhaps most significantly to social relations, culminating in a redefinition of humanity's place in the world," the paper explains. "The development of collective activities and rituals, and the construction of communal buildings with strong symbolic elements, was instrumental in advancing this new way of life."
While older examples of narrative art have been identified—among them, the nearly 17,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux and a roughly 44,000-year-old cave panel on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi—these are the first known to show a progressing narrative structure.
