Border Cave

Border Cave is an archaeological site located in the western Lebombo Mountains in Kwazulu-Natal. The rock shelter has one of the longest archaeological records in southern Africa, which spans from the Middle Stone Age to the Iron Age.

The west-facing cave is located about 100 m below the crest of the Lebombo mountain range. The variable rates of weathering of the Lebombo's Jurassic rocks led to the cave's formation.

Researchers have excavated at Border Cave since 1934. In chronological order, excavations occurred in 1934 (Raymond Dart), 1940 (W.E. Horton, non-scientific), 1941–1942 (Cooke, Malan and Wells), 1970–1975, and 1987 (Peter Beaumont). Lucinda Backwell and colleagues reopened the site in 2015, and are currently excavating and analyzing more archaeological materials. Researchers have used a combination of carbon-14 dating, amino acid racemisation, luminescence, and electron spin resonance to date the site's oldest deposits to ~250,000 years before present. Border Cave's remains include human remains, lithics, bone tools, botanical remains (i.e. grass bedding) and animal bones.

Border Cave's long occupational sequence makes the site an important location for studying prehistoric hunter-gatherer behavior and the causes and timing of the Middle to Later Stone Age transition. The site's human remains have led to debates on the timing of modern human origins in southern Africa. Some of the cave's other artifacts (i.e. bone points) have also played into researchers' debates on the origins of hunter-gatherer cultural adaptations and the appropriateness of ethnographic analogy in interpreting the archaeological record.