Did Ancient Humans Actually Live Underground?

Deep beneath the Turkish town of Derinkuyu, 18 levels of tunnels and chambers plunge more than 85 meters into the earth. This is not a mine or a tomb. It is an underground city, complete with sleeping quarters, stables, wineries, ventilation shafts, water wells, places of worship, and communal kitchens carved from soft volcanic rock by hand. At its peak, it could shelter roughly 20,000 people for months at a time, sealed behind massive rolling stone doors designed so each level could be blocked off independently.

This was a fully self-sustaining underground civilization built deliberately over many generations to outlast sieges that could drag on for weeks. Did ancient humans really live underground? The answer is yes, but the full story is far stranger and more layered than a simple word suggests. The popular myth of cavemen—hairy, dim-witted prehistoric humans permanently squatting in caves, grunting by firelight—is one of the most misleading ideas in archaeology.

Researchers studying actual Paleolithic settlement patterns across multiple continents have found that most prehistoric sites are not located in caves at all. Early humans were overwhelmingly mobile hunter-gatherers who followed migrating herds and seasonal plant availability, setting up temporary camps in the open air far more often than retreating into caves. The caveman image persists because of a massive bias in the archaeological record itself. Caves are extraordinarily effective at preserving stone tools, hearth ash, and wall art over hundreds of thousands of years, while open-air camps were scrubbed away by wind and rain within centuries.

This gives the unavoidable but misleading impression that early humans spent the Stone Age permanently indoors. In reality, they used caves the way a modern backpacker uses a mountain hut: gratefully, temporarily, and rarely as a default lifestyle. However, at various points across recorded history, humans did not merely passively use existing caves—they dug entirely new underground worlds from scratch. Cappadocia, in modern Turkey, is the most dramatic example.

The region sits on a thick deposit of volcanic tuff, a rock soft enough to carve with simple hand tools but hard enough to hold its shape. Over roughly 200 underground settlements have been identified across the region so far, some dating back potentially to the Hittites around the 17th to 13th centuries BC. The most extensive expansions came later from the Phrygiansin the 8th and 7th centuries BC, and then during the Byzantine era starting around 330 AD, when persecuted early Christians fled underground in large numbers to escape the Roman Empire’s campaigns against their communities. These cities were built generation after generation, with each successive culture inheriting, expanding, and improving the work of those who came before.

Derinkuyu stretches down 18 levels and could house 20,000 people for months. The nearby city of Kaymaklı covers eight excavated levels, and the two were reportedly connected by tunnels stretching eight to nine kilometers, allowing travel entirely underground between them. Another Byzantine-era city, Özkonak, was reportedly even larger, with estimates suggesting it could shelter up to 60,000 people for as long as three months. The engineering sophistication still impresses modern structural engineers.

Ventilation shafts reached from the deepest levels to the surface, providing continuous fresh air. Water wells dug from inside the underground levels ensured independent drinking water that couldn’t be poisoned or blocked by enemies above. Massive circular stone doors, weighing hundreds of kilograms, could be rolled into place from inside to seal entire sections behind an airtight barrier, and could only be opened from within. As recently as 2019, unexpected flooding in the settlement of Çavuşin led to the accidental discovery of another previously unknown underground town, roughly 5,000 years old and spanning three stories, nicknamed “Giyergiyer,”” which translates to”Enter and See.

” Researchers believe many more underground cities likely remain undiscovered beneath the region’s vineyards and towns. The motivation behind all this digging was consistently the same: survival through concealment from enemies too powerful to fight on the surface. Cappadocia sat directly in the path of armies marching between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Persians came through, Romans came through, and Arab forces during the Arab-Byzantine wars swept through repeatedly between 780 and 1180 AD.

These incursions drove large-scale Christian populations underground in the most dramatic fashion documented in the record. They retreated with families, livestock, and food stores, sealed the entrances, and waited in the dark until the danger passed. These cities weren’t designed to win a fight. They were designed to make the fight irrelevant by removing the target entirely from the visible landscape.

An invading army arriving at an empty village had essentially nothing to conquer, with the people sitting 50 meters below their feet, drinking from sealed wells and breathing air from shafts too narrow to climb. Cappadocia isn’t remotely the only place humans have deliberately chosen to live underground, and the reasons haven’t always been about hiding from armies. In Coober Pedy, a small mining town in the Australian Outback, roughly half the population has historically lived in”dugouts”—homes carved directly into sandstone hillsides to escape surface temperatures that regularly exceed 40° Celsius in summer. Underground, the temperature sits at a stable 22° to 24° Celsius year-round with no heating or air conditioning, making these fully furnished permanent residences with bedrooms, kitchens, and even arched ceilings.

The town also has underground churches, shops, and an underground hotel. In Matmata, southern Tunisia, Berber communities carved pit homes into soft sandstone, creating sunken courtyards surrounded by naturally insulated rooms, many still occupied today—and famously used as Luke Skywalker’s childhood home on Tatooine在 the original Star Wars films. In Naours, France, an underground city of over 300 chambers carved into chalk served as refuge during conflicts from medieval times through both World Wars, with soldiers carving names alongside centuries-old graffiti. In China, the yaodong dwellings of the Loess Plateau have housed millions across centuries, with an estimated 30 to 40 million people still living into them as recently as the early 2000s.

This sheer geographic spread—from Turkey to Australia to Tunisia to France to China—none of them connected by shared culture or trade, shows that going underground is a recurring, independently rediscovered human strategy that appears wherever conditions make it the smartest survival option. Living underground also has profound physiological and psychological effects. Extended habitation fundamentally alters the human relationship with natural light, circadian rhythm, and the perception of time. French researcher Michel Siffre demonstrated this during self-experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, spending months alone in caves without clocks or daylight.

His internal clock consistently drifted toward longer subjective days, settling into a cycle closer to 25 hours than the actual 24, causing him to lose track of actual calendar time by accumulating an extra perceived hour each day. For the inhabitants of Cappadocia’s cities, who retreated belowthe surface for weeks or months during real sieges, these effects were almost certainly real, even if nobody then understood the underlying biology. Sustained darkness broken only by oil lamps, stale recycled air, no natural sunlight for the most vulnerable members sheltered deepest, and the constant weight of not knowing what was happening above—all of this shaped the lived experience of underground survival

So, did ancient humans actually live underground? The honest answer is layered.

If you mean, did prehistoric hunter-gatherers permanently inhabit dark cave interiors as full-time residences? The answer is largely no. The caveman image is a persistent myth built on preservation bias, not a genuine reflection of daily life. They used caves temporarily, seasonally, and for cultural purposes, but overwhelmingly lived outside in open-air camps that simply didn’t survive.

But if you mean, did humans deliberately build entire functioning cities underground, complete with housing, water systems, ventilation, livestock pens, grain storage, and places of worship designed for extended habitation by thousands? Then the answer is an emphatic, thoroughly documented yes. They did it repeatedly across continents and centuries, from the 18 levels of Derinkuyu sealed behind stone doors during sieges, to the dugouts of Coober Pedy carved to escape desert heat, to the yaodongs of China still housing millions well into the 21st century. The Earth makes a genuinely excellent home when the surface doesn’t.

It stays cool when the ground above bakes, stays warm when the surface freezes, hides you completely, and costs nothing. All you have to do is start digging.