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Throughout records, primitive peoples have made use of caves. The earliest human fossils found in caves come from a series of caves close to Krugersdorp and Mokopane in South Africa. The cave web sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai B, Drimolen, Malapa, Cooper’s D, Gladysvale, Gondolin and Makapansgat have yielded various early human species courting lower back to between three and 1,000,000 years ago, inclusive of Australopithecus africanus, 7Australopithecus sediba and Paranthropus robustus. However, it is not commonly concept that these early human beings have been dwelling inside the caves, but that they had been brought into the caves by using carnivores that had killed them.[citation needed]

The first early hominid ever observed in Africa, the Taung Child in 1924, became also concept for many years to come from a cave, wherein it had been deposited after being preyed upon by using an eagle. However, that is now debated. Caves do form in the dolomite of the Ghaap Plateau, including the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age site of Wonderwerk Cave; however, the caves that form alongside the escarpment’s area, like that hypothesised for the Taung Child, are fashioned inside a secondary limestone deposit known as tufa. There is numerous evidence for different early human species inhabiting caves from at least a million years in the past in unique parts of the sector, inclusive of Homo erectus in China at Zhoukoudian, Homo rhodesiensis in South Africa at the Cave of Hearths (Makapansgat), Homo neandertalensis and Homo heidelbergensis in Europe at Archaeological Site of Atapuerca, Homo floresiensis in Indonesia, and the Denisovans in southern Siberia.

In southern Africa, early modern people regularly used sea caves as refuge starting about a hundred and eighty,000 years ago once they discovered to exploit the ocean for the primary time. The oldest known website is PP13B at Pinnacle Point. This may have allowed rapid expansion of humans out of Africa and colonization of regions of the world together with Australia by using 60–50,000 years ago. Throughout southern Africa, Australia, and Europe, early modern-day people used caves and rock shelters as sites for rock art, which include the ones at Giants Castle. Caves inclusive of the yaodong in China had been used for shelter; different caves have been used for burials (inclusive of rock-reduce tombs), or as religious websites (together with Buddhist caves). Among the regarded sacred caves are China’s Cave of a Thousand Buddhas and the sacred caves of Crete.