Somebody cut a kidney-shaped pit through a plastered floor and put three people in it. Not laid out, not arranged as you would arrange a body you had just lost. By the time the pit was closed, the skulls had been collected into one corner, the long bones had been stacked along a wall, and everything in between had been pushed toward the middle. In a second trench, a short distance away and immediately beside one of the great circular stone buildings the site is famous for, a young woman lies on her left side with her knees drawn up to her chest, facing east, more or less exactly as she was put there.
Those are the first two burials ever found at Gobeklitepe, and they have arrived after roughly thirty years of excavation at a place whose entire popular reputation rests on the fact that it did not have any.
The paper reporting them was published in PLOS ONE under the title First burials give insights into mortuary rites at Gobeklitepe, Early Neolithic Turkiye, and it has only two authors, which is itself slightly startling for a site of this fame. Julia Gresky is the first of them, an anthropologist attached both to the Faculty of Biology and Psychology at Georg-August University in Gottingen and to the Division of Natural Sciences at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Her co-author is Lee Clare of the institute’s Istanbul department, who runs the Gobeklitepe research project’s prehistoric archaeology and research data side. Gresky is also the credited photographer on most of the paper’s figures, which is a small detail that tells you something useful: she was not handed a box of bones in Berlin. She was in the trench.
To understand why two graves are worth a paper, you have to understand the specific shape of the absence they fill.
Gobeklitepe, in southeastern Turkiye, is the site most people have heard of as the world’s oldest temple. Huge T-shaped limestone pillars, some of them carved with foxes and boars and scorpions and vultures, arranged into circular enclosures and then deliberately buried. It predates pottery, predates writing by thousands of years, and in the first two decades after excavation began it was interpreted as a ritual centre rather than a place to live. Hunter-gatherers, the argument ran, converged on it from across the region, did whatever it was they came to do, and went home again. A sanctuary without a congregation in residence.
Human bone had been turning up there for years. It just never turned up in graves. Fragments kept coming out of the fill of the monumental buildings, loose, broken, unassociated with any skeleton or any pit. Gresky and Clare note that these fragments come from males and females across every age category, which means it was not a selected population. It was everybody. And the distribution of them, as the paper puts it, remained enigmatic. They were not buried. They were just in the dirt.
That absence is what fed decades of speculation, including the most widely circulated idea about the place, which is that it was a site of some kind of skull cult. Fragmented human remains with no graves to account for them is an invitation to imagine a practice, and plenty of practices were imagined.
The two burials date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, which the authors place between roughly 8,700 and 8,000 BCE. The collective one, in a trench labelled DR1, is the kidney-shaped pit, cut into the plaster floor of a rectangular building. There are at least three people in it. Individual 1 is a female of at least thirty-five. Individual 2 is a male between twenty and thirty. Individual 3 is a girl of eleven to fourteen. The single burial, in trench L09-65, is a woman of twenty to thirty, found in a small space just west of the structure the project calls Special Building A.
Then comes the part that turns this from a discovery report into something more interesting, which is what the bones themselves had been through.
Gresky read them one at a time, and the detail is specific enough to be checkable. On the collective burial, the ends of the long bones, the epiphyses, are broken off and missing across both adults, leaving only the shafts, and those survive as large fragments rather than whole. The left ulna and right radius of individual 1 carry horizontal fractures. The left humerus of individual 2 has a horizontal fracture with smooth margins. Most of the fractures across the assemblage have serrated edges, which is the signature of bone breaking long after death under slow pressure from the soil above it. But some of them are smooth, and several are helical, spiralling breaks of the kind that only happen while there is still collagen in the bone. That is a timing clue. Some of this damage happened while the bone was still relatively fresh, and some happened centuries later.
There are gnaw marks, mostly on individual 2, including at a ridge on the right humerus, and also on the outer surface of the ribs of individual 3. Rodents, almost certainly. And over most of it, a crust: calcareous deposits cover the surfaces of 61.4 per cent of the fragments, and where they occur they cover between 70 and 100 per cent of the surface area. The single burial in L09-65 is in better condition overall but tells the same story. Every epiphysis broken and gone. Shafts snapped mainly into three large pieces. Helical breaks in both tibiae. Possible rodent gnawing on the right ulna and the left tibia, and on that tibia one gnawed patch is partly covered by the calcareous crust and one is completely covered by it, which puts the gnawing before the crust and gives you a sequence rather than a list.
What is just as important is what Gresky did not find. No cut marks. No heat alteration. No ochre. Nothing on these bones indicates that anyone defleshed them, burned them, painted them, or handled them ritually at all. The damage is the damage of time, water, soil and animals.
And that is the actual argument of the paper, and it is a quieter and better one than a grave discovery.
The taphonomic signature of the two burials, the high fragmentation, the heavy calcareous crusting and the rodent gnawing, closely matches the signature of all those loose human bone fragments that have been coming out of the fill of the monumental buildings for years. Which supports a fairly undramatic explanation for them. The mound at Gobeklitepe is a mound. Material on the higher parts of it moves downhill. If there were subfloor burials in buildings further up the slope, and the deposits containing them slid down into the lower-lying monumental buildings, then the scattered fragments are not the residue of a mysterious practice. They are graves that came apart and travelled.
The authors are careful not to overclaim it. They say explicitly that this explanation does not rule out additional mortuary practices, and they frame their results as underscoring how varied burial ritual was across Neolithic Anatolia rather than as settling anything.
Now the part a reader who knows Gobeklitepe as the world’s oldest temple needs stated precisely, because it is easy to inflate and the paper does not inflate it.
Burying your dead under the floor of a building is a thing done by people who live in that building. Across the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, as the German Archaeological Institute noted when it announced the publication, the dead were generally buried within settlements rather than in separate cemeteries. Subfloor graves are a domestic signature. So two subfloor burials at a site long read as a place nobody lived push in one direction.
But here is the honest version of what is being challenged, and by what. The authors do not present these burials as the evidence that overturns the sanctuary reading. They present them as one more item on a pile that already existed. Their own wording is that during the first two decades of research the site was interpreted as a ritual centre lacking significant permanent occupation, and that recent years have already seen that view reassessed, with increasing evidence for dwellings and domestic activities across the whole of the site’s sequence. The burials, they write, provide yet another indication of the additional domestic function of the site.
Yet another indication. Not the proof, and not the first of its kind. The reassessment of Gobeklitepe from pure sanctuary to inhabited settlement has been underway among specialists for some years, driven by architecture and domestic debris rather than by graves. What has lagged behind is the public picture, which is still largely the one from the early years of excavation. If you have been carrying around the idea of a temple that people visited and left, the thing to update is not that two graves have demolished it, but that it was already being dismantled and you were not told, and these graves are the newest brick taken out of the wall.
It also needs saying that two burials is a very small number to carry an argument about how a site was used across seven centuries, and the authors clearly know it. Nothing in the paper claims that these two graves establish permanent year-round occupation of Gobeklitepe. The claim is narrower: the site had a domestic function in addition to its monumental one, which was already being argued, and these burials are consistent with that, and separately they offer a mechanism that plausibly accounts for the scattered bone that nobody could previously explain. Anyone reporting this as the discovery that proved people lived at the world’s oldest temple is going further than Gresky and Clare do.
There is one more word worth pausing on, because it is being used in two different senses. The paper’s own abstract calls these the first two intact burials, and the word intact has gone into the coverage as though it described the bones. It does not. It describes the context. An intact burial, in this usage, is one that was still a burial when it was found, still in its pit, still identifiable as a deliberate interment, as opposed to a handful of fragments in a fill layer. The bones inside those intact burials are extensively broken, crusted and chewed. That is, in fact, the whole reason the paper exists. Reading intact as meaning well preserved inverts the finding.
And the paper leaves its loose ends visibly loose, which is the most quietly impressive thing about it.
In the collective burial, one of the three crania looks too mature to belong to the eleven to fourteen year old girl. Two metatarsal bones have unusually round shafts that do not match anything belonging to the three individuals identified. So the figure caption marks that cranium in pale blue and says, in print, that it probably belongs to individual 3 but could belong to a fourth, older person. There may be four people in that pit. The authors do not know, and they say so rather than rounding it off.
The single burial has a stranger problem again, and it is a problem the excavation created for itself. That trench was first opened in 2012. The burial was found, there was not enough time left in the season to deal with it properly, so it was sealed back up and left. It was finally excavated ten years later, in 2022. Which means the skeleton now exists in two colours on the diagram: the bones lifted in 2022, and the bones lifted in 2012. And the authors cannot be certain they belong to the same human being. Some of the material from the first season could belong to another individual, possibly male. On the published figure, those bones are marked in red and the rest in violet and blue, a decade of excavation history rendered as a colour key on a skeleton.
So the final state of the evidence is this. A site that was understood for a generation as somewhere people travelled to, did something extraordinary, and departed, has produced two graves cut under floors, which is what people do where they live. The scattered bones that fed thirty years of speculation about what was being done to the dead at Gobeklitepe now have an unglamorous and probably correct explanation involving a slope, water and gravity. And at the centre of it, in a pit under a plaster floor laid nearly ten thousand years ago, there is a skull that either belongs to a teenage girl or belongs to an older person nobody has yet counted, and a leg bone found in one decade that has still not been proved to come from the same body as the skull found in another.