Art World
Archaeologists in Turkey Have Discovered an Unusual 11,000-Year-Old Statue of a Male Figure
Karahan Tepe is one of the world's oldest temple sites, and has yielded dozens of finds in excavations over decades.
Max Berlinger
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Archaeologists on a dig in Turkey’s Şanlıurfa Province have uncovered a large statue of a man holding onto his penis with both hands.
Standing seven and a half feet tall, the figure comes from a site called Karahan Tepe and dates to around 11,000 years ago, according to Yahoo News.
“Any interpretation of the statue is conjectural at this point,” Ted Banning, an anthropology professor at the University of Toronto, told Live Science, adding that the man represented in the sculpture may be “an important ancestor associated with the building in which it was found.”
It’s hypothesized that the figure was likely “the progenitor of a social group, such as a lineage or clan, associated with the building,” Banning said.
Karahan Tepe is one of the world’s oldest temple sites, and has yielded dozens of finds in excavations over decades. Additionally, the statue was found with a life-size representation of a wild boar.
This discovery is just part of a growing field of NSFW art throughout the ages. Earlier this summer a phallic pendant was discovered in Mongolia that dates back 42,000 years. The iconic frescoes in Pompeii are basically prehistoric pornography.
Meanwhile, one of the oldest works of narrative art, discovered last year, also in Turkey, was also of a man holding his own penis. Apparently, as long as men have been around and able to scribble on or carve into rocks, they’ve been obsessed with their genitals.
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