Archaeologists uncovered intact burials from 8700 to 8000 B.C. at Göbekli Tepe

Beneath the plaster floor of a rectangular building at Göbekli Tepe, the German Archaeological Institute’s team excavated a collective grave holding at least three people: an adult woman older than 35, an adult man aged 20 to 30 and an adolescent girl of 11 to 14. A second grave, found beside a special building, held a young woman. Both date to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B contexts of 8700 to 8000 B.C., and both are the first undisturbed burials excavated at the site in southeastern Turkey, which excavators have worked since 1995.

For three decades diggers at Göbekli Tepe recovered human bone only as scattered fragments in the fill of buildings. The two graves finally give archaeologists an actual burial practice to study, with ages, sexes and body positions on record, instead of fragments whose origin had to be guessed.

The two graves in the PLOS One paper

Julia Gresky and Lee Clare describe the burials in a PLOS One paper published September 22, 2026, titled “First burials give insights into mortuary rites at Göbeklitepe, Early Neolithic Türkiye.” Their abstract states that “the first two intact burials were discovered in Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (8,700-8,000 BCE) contexts.”

Burial 1 came from trench DR1 and holds a minimum of three individuals, possibly four. The paper lists an adult female of 35 or more years, an adult male of 20 to 30 and an adolescent female of 11 to 14. Archaeology magazine’s September 25 report adds that the three lay in a kidney-shaped pit. The team first found it in 2017 and excavated it in 2022.

Burial 2 came from trench L09-65, next to Special Building A. A young adult woman of 20 to 30 lay in a flexed position on her left side. She was discovered in 2012 and fully excavated in 2022, a ten-year gap between the first glimpse of the grave and its removal.

Bones with the same damage as the scattered fragments

The remains in both graves show fragmentation, calcareous deposits and rodent gnawing. Those are the same alterations seen on the loose bone fragments that excavators had collected from building fills since the project began in 1995. The matching damage is the core of the paper’s argument. If bones in a grave look like bones in a building fill, the fill bones may have started life in graves.

Gresky, who leads the work at the institute, offers two routes for how fragments reached the buildings. In Archaeology’s account, she says the bone fragments found in buildings “may have been placed there during ritual activity,” or may have been carried into the site from burials placed higher up on the mound through erosion and landslides. The abstract leans toward erosion, noting that erosional processes may explain the dispersed bone.

Skull cult hypothesis revisited

The new graves arrive against a 2017 claim by some of the same authors. In a June 2017 Science Advances paper, Gresky, J. Haelm and Clare analyzed about 700 human bone fragments and identified three skull fragments with deep flint-cut grooves and, on the best-preserved cranium, a drilled hole. They read this as evidence of a Neolithic skull cult, with heads possibly suspended from a post or building beam.

Gizmodo’s coverage of the new paper quotes its argument that the scattered bones belonged to people “otherwise buried normally” whose remains were pushed out of graves by a landslide or other erosion, and that the team found “indisputable evidence” of continuous permanent settlement. The outlet also notes that not everything about the skull cult is discarded: bioarchaeologist Scott Haddow told it that “there’s this focus or obsession with skulls throughout the Neolithic,” and that communities practiced it in different ways. Gizmodo’s report frames the cut marks as deliberate bone modification that coexisted with ordinary burial.

A hilltop that was lived on

Göbekli Tepe’s monumental structures went up between 9600 and 8200 B.C., and UNESCO, which inscribed the site in 2018, notes T-shaped pillars up to 5.50 meters tall carved with wild animals. UNESCO’s description reads the structures as probably tied to rituals “most likely of a funerary nature.” The graves date to the closing centuries of that span and just beyond it, from 8700 to 8000 B.C.

IFLScience’s summary describes the site as a settlement where people “were born, lived, and died” rather than a place visited only for ceremonies, and Archaeology reports that the burials point to people living at the site. Two graves are a small sample for so large a claim, and the paper keeps ritual placement of bones on the table. Gresky’s second explanation, that fragments eroded downslope from burials higher on the mound, if correct, would imply that more graves remain in the uppermost layers of the hill.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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