A man riding a leopard

Exceptional discovery at the Neolithic site of Karahantepe, in Turkey! 

"An 11,000-year-old composite statue, depicting a human being seated on a leopard, has just been unearthed. Announced today by Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, this piece adds to the remarkable human and animal figures already discovered at Karahantepe (Taş Tepeler)"...

A god riding on an animal (calendar marker) from which it was derived through anthropomorfisation is one of the standard stages of god development. 

People notice overlap between a significant event related to agriculture (start of rain season, start of snowmelt, start of annual flood, time to sow or harvest particular type of grain, reeds, fruit, vegetable...) and an annual lifecycle event of a common animal (mating, birthing, migrating, hibernating...).  

People start using the annual animal lifecycle event (when leopards mate Jan/Feb) as an animal calendar marker for peak rain season in the Şanlıurfa area...  

As I said already: Mythology is a result of people being very good at noticing patterns in nature and very bad at distinguishing between correlation and causation...  

People start believing that mating leopards actually cause rain to fall...  

When rain doesn't fall when it is supposed to fall, people start praying to the leopards for rain...  

Of course it is much easier to pray to a human, so leopard gets anthropomorphised into a leopard headed human god, like on Sayburç relief, and then into fully human god riding a leopard, or wearing leopard skin...  

Gods ride their animal calendar markers everywhere. This is a symbolic equating of the animal and its anthropomorphic god twin...

So is god standing between two of their (deified) animal calendar markers...

This is the same guy, but this time standing between the leopards, which is the calendaric equivalent of riding a leopard...

The "earliest known narrative scene, telling an ancient story", at the 11,000-year-old site of Sayburç in south-eastern Turkey.

Of course, "no one" knows what the story is about...I give full analyis of this relief in my post Oldest narrative scene...

Leopards have a special place in later Çatalhöyük mythology too...Or should I say deified animal calendar...

There we find fat (fertile) woman (earth) sitting between leopards or on leopards in Çatalhöyük. Art by @AthopeMarie

Remember this: "When I was a kid, I was very poor and always hungry. All I ever wanted to be when I grew up was to be fat" -  BB King from one of his interviews...

These Çatalhöyük "goddesses" are actually the depictions of the Fat (of the land) Goddess of (grain) Fertility...

I talked about this symbolic depiction of the fertile earth as a fat and most likely pregnant woman in my posts Palaeolithic Venus figurines and The faceless one where try to answer the question: Why were (most) European Palaeolithic female figurines made faceless and fat with super exaggerated sexual characteristics? Cause (maybe) they don't depict real women. Cause (maybe) they depict an idea of fertility...Goddess of Fertility...

Çatalhöyük figurines do have faces, but they are rudimentary and the emphasis is on fertility and prosperity body features...

That these are definitely not just random nudes can be seen from the fact that several of these figurines are depicted with leopards and leopard cubs...

Why leopards?

Leopards are solitary animals and only come together during mating season, Jan/Feb

 which coincides with middle of the wet season in the area of Çatalhöyük...

Leopards are everywhere in Çatalhöyük...Usually in pairs...Here is a leopard shrine where the focal point is a pair of facing (mating) leopards...I believe that they were deified animal calendar markers marking the wet half of the year...

Leopard and rain...This time in Iran...

It is this rain (and snow) that makes land in the areas of  Çatalhöyük fat and fertile...Also, the mating of local leopards marked the beginning of the rise of the level of the local rivers...You can read more about this in my post Crane symbolism in Catalhoyuk 

What is also very interesting is that Eurasian leopard gestation period is about 100 days. That means that cubs conceived in Jan/Feb are born in Apr/May...

Right on time to mark the most important event for the Neolithic Anatolian farmers: beginning of the grain harvest season...

I talked about this in my post PPN snake calendar marker, in which I talk about the  (symbolic) link between the beginning of the (wild) grain harvesting season and the mating of the most common Anatolian snakes, vipers, which both start in Apr/May...

So the fat mother of grain and fat leopard mother both gave birth at the same time...

Very difficult not to notice, if you were a hunter-gatherer turned farmer in the Neolithic Çatalhöyük...

Hence fat Çatalhöyük goddess giving birth sitting between two leopards...

Finally, look at this mural depicting a bull hunt. Now that you know what raging bull (Jul/Aug, beginnign of wild cattle mating season marked by vicious bull fights) and leopard (Jan/Feb, beginning of leopard mating season) represent as animal calendar markers, you will understand why raging red (fire) bull (drought) is being hunted by hunters wearing leopard (rain) skins...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, which are at the root of all our mythologies, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...