The dry expanses of southeastern Turkey, home to some of humanity's most ancient sites, have yielded fresh discoveries in the form of a stone phallus and a coloured boar.
For researchers, the carved statue of a man holding his phallus with two hands while seated atop a bench adorned with a leopard, is a new clue in the puzzle of our very beginnings.
Necmi Karul, who heads the prehistory department at Istanbul University, found the toppled statue that was broken into three sections. But the first modest photos of the statue released by Turkey's culture ministry led the local press to suspect censorship in the Muslim nation that has veered conservative under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"Those who entered here knew the symbols... they knew the meaning, it told them a story but we don't know it," he added, noting they have not found any female figures. No sooner had Karul unearthed the Karahantepe man, when he made another discovery the same week at Gobekli Tepe.
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