Beneath the cobblestone streets of the small Turkish town of Derinkuyu, a network of 18 levels of tunnels, chambers, and passageways burrows more than 85 meters straight down into the earth. This is not a mine and not a tomb—it is a city. A fully functioning underground settlement with sleeping quarters, livestock stables, wineries, oil presses, ventilation shafts, water wells, places of worship, and communal kitchens, all carved by hand into soft volcanic rock without power tools or heavy machinery. At full capacity, it could shelter roughly 20,000 people—not for an afternoon, but for months at a time, sealed behind massive rolling stone doors designed so each level could be blocked off independently if invaders breached the one above.
This was not a temporary hiding spot hastily scraped out in a moment of panic. It was a self-sustaining underground civilization built deliberately over many generations to outlast sieges that might drag on for weeks or months, with the entire population living, eating, worshipping, and raising livestock below ground while the surface was presumably occupied by an invading army. So the answer to whether ancient humans lived underground is yes. But the full story is considerably stranger and more interesting than a single word suggests, because living underground means wildly different things depending on when, where, and why in human history you are asking about it.
The popular image of grunting cavemen permanently huddled in dark caves throughout prehistory is one of the most persistent and misleading myths in archaeology. The term “caveman” has been lodged in popular culture for over a century, conjuring an image of dim-witted prehistoric humans squatting inside dark caves, grunting by firelight, and conducting their entire existence within the same damp rock enclosure from birth to death. That image is almost entirely inaccurate. Researchers studying actual Paleolithic settlement patterns across multiple continents have found that the vast majority of prehistoric archaeological sites are not located in caves at all.
Early humans were overwhelmingly mobile hunter-gatherers who followed migrating herds, seasonal plant availability, and changing weather patterns across open landscape, setting up temporary camps in the open air far more often than they retreated into caves for extended periods. The caveman image persists because caves are extraordinarily effective at preserving things over enormous spans of time. Stone tools, hearth ash layers, and wall art survive in caves while the same evidence on an open plain is destroyed by wind, rain, and erosion. This has produced a dramatically outsized proportion of the most spectacular discoveries—from the painted galleries of Lascaux in France to the symbolic behavior recorded at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 75,000 to 100,000 years—giving the misleading impression that ancient humans spent the entire Stone Age inside these enclosures.
They didn’t. They visited caves to cook temporarily, painted on walls during culturally significant occasions, and sheltered inside during harsh weather, ice-age winters, and storms. But most of their actual daily lives—hunting, gathering, traveling, socializing—happened outside under the sky, the same way most hunter-gatherer populations documented by modern anthropologists still live today. Early humans used caves the way a modern backpacker uses a mountain hut: gratefully, temporarily, and only when circumstances clearly called for it.
There is an enormous practical difference between occasionally sheltering in a convenient natural cave and deliberately engineering an entirely new underground world designed from scratch for sustained human habitation. At various points across recorded history, humans didn’t just use existing caves—they dug entirely new ones from scratch, sometimes on a scale that is difficult to comprehend even with modern construction standards. Cappadocia, in the heart of modern Turkey, is the most dramatic example of this phenomenon anywhere on the planet. The region sits on a thick deposit of volcanic tuff, a rock formed when volcanic ash compacts over millions of years into something soft enough to carve with simple hand tools but structurally hard enough to maintain its shape once carved.
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, with the most extensive expansions carried out later by the Phrygians in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, and then further developed during the Byzantine era starting around 330 AD, when persecuted early Christians fled underground in large numbers to escape the Roman Empire’s systematic persecution. These cities were not built in a single campaign by one civilization working from a master plan. They accumulated generation after generation, with each successive culture inheriting, expanding, and improving the work of those who came before, sometimes across thousands of continuous years of incremental excavation. Derinkuyu is the deepest and most famous of these cities, stretching down 18 levels and capable of housing 20,000 people for extended periods.
The nearby city of Kaymaklı covers a similarly enormous footprint across eight excavated levels, and the two cities were reportedly connected by tunnels stretching eight to nine kilometers between them—meaning you could walk entirely underground from one complete subterranean city to another without ever seeing daylight. The later Byzantine-era city of Özkonak was reportedly even larger, with estimates suggesting it could shelter up to 60,000 people for as long as three consecutive months. The engineering sophistication inside these cities still impresses modern structural engineers. Ventilation shafts reaching from the deepest inhabited levels to the surface provided continuous fresh air flow.
Water wells, deliberately dug from inside the underground levels rather than from the exposed surface, ensured independent access to fresh drinking water that couldn’t be poisoned or blocked by an enemy above. Massive circular stone doors, each weighing hundreds of kilograms, could be rolled into place from inside to seal individual levels or entire sections of the city behind what amounted to an airtight barrier. Critically, these doors could only be opened from the inside, a deliberately one-directional security feature. As recently as 2019, unexpected flooding in the small settlement of Çavuşin, north of Avanos, led to the accidental discovery of yet another previously unknown underground town, roughly 5,000 years old and spanning three stories, nicknamed Giyergiyer by locals, which translates to “Enter and See.
” Researchers believe many more underground cities almost certainly remain undiscovered beneath the vineyards and modern towns scattered across the region. The reason behind all this digging was almost universally the same basic motivation: survival through concealment from enemies too powerful to fight directly on the surface. Cappadocia’s location made it a corridor of invasion throughout ancient history, sitting directly in the path of armies marching between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Persians came through, the Romans came through, and Arab forces during the Arab-Byzantine wars swept through the region repeatedly between 780 and 1180 AD.
These incursions drove large-scale Christian populations underground, retreating beneath the earth with their families, livestock, and food stores, sealing the entrances carefully behind them, and waiting in the dark until the danger above had passed. The underground cities weren’t designed to win a fight against a superior military force. They were designed to make the fight irrelevant by removing the target entirely from the visible landscape. An invading army arriving at a seemingly empty village had essentially nothing to conquer and no one to fight—the people were sitting 50 meters directly below their feet, drinking from sealed wells, eating from underground grain stores, and breathing air supplied by ventilation shafts too narrow for any adult soldier to climb through.
Cappadocia isn’t remotely the only place humans have deliberately chosen to live underground, and the reasons haven’t always been about hiding from invading armies. In Coober Pedy, a small mining town in the scorching Outback of South Australia, roughly half the population has historically lived underground in homes called dugouts, carved directly into surrounding sandstone hillsides to escape surface temperatures that regularly exceed 40°C during summer and can swing by 30 or more degrees between day and night. Underground, the temperature sits at a remarkably stable 22° to 24°C year-round, with no heating, no air conditioning, and effectively no energy bill. These are fully finished, permanent residences with bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and in some impressive cases, multiple interconnected rooms with carved shelving and arched ceilings.
Coober Pedy also has underground churches, shops, and even an underground hotel. A remarkably similar logic produced the troglodyte dwellings of Matmata in southern Tunisia, where Berber communities carved pit homes directly into the soft sandstone of the desert landscape, creating sunken courtyards surrounded by underground rooms naturally insulated against extreme desert heat. Many are still occupied today, and some were famously used as the filming location for Luke Skywalker’s childhood home on the fictional planet Tatooine in the original Star Wars films. In France, the underground city of Naours contains over 300 chambers carved into chalk beneath the Picardy countryside, used as refuges during conflicts from medieval times through both World Wars, when soldiers carved their names into the tunnel walls alongside graffiti dating back centuries.
In China, the underground dwellings of the Loess Plateau, called yaodongs, have housed millions of people across centuries of continuous use, with an estimated 30 to 40 million Chinese citizens still living in some form of yaodong dwelling as recently as the early 2000s. The geographic spread and cultural diversity of these independently developed underground dwelling traditions—from Turkey to Australia to Tunisia to France to China—shows that going underground is not some isolated peculiar response confined to one culture. It is a recurring, independently rediscovered human strategy that keeps appearing across entirely unrelated civilizations wherever specific conditions make it the smartest, most practical available survival option—whether those conditions involve invading armies, extreme heat, or the simple recognition that the earth itself is an effective building material available everywhere, free of charge. Living underground for extended periods has significant physiological and psychological effects.
Researchers have found that extended underground habitation fundamentally alters the human relationship with natural light, circadian rhythm, and the subjective passage of time. In the most extreme documented cases, people living deep underground for extended periods have lost all accurate sense of how much calendar time had passed, because without the daily rise and fall of sunlight, the internal biological clock drifts. French researcher Michel Siffre famously demonstrated this during self-experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, spending months alone in underground caves without access to clocks, daylight, or external time cues. His internal clock consistently drifted toward longer subjective days, eventually settling into a cycle closer to 25 hours than the actual 24, meaning he lost track of actual calendar time by accumulating an extra perceived hour with each passing day.
Siffre sometimes believed weeks fewer had passed than actually had when researchers finally told him the real date. For the inhabitants of Cappadocia’s underground cities, who retreated below the surface with their entire communities for weeks or months during actual military sieges, these effects were almost certainly real and psychologically meaningful. Life underground during an extended siege meant sustained darkness broken only by oil lamps and flickering torches, constant exposure to stale air despite the ventilation shafts, no natural sunlight reaching the deepest levels, and the constant psychological weight of knowing that whatever was happening on the surface couldn’t be seen or assessed directly until someone climbed back up to check. So did ancient humans actually live underground?
The honest, complete answer is a layered one. If you mean, did prehistoric hunter-gatherers permanently inhabit dark cave interiors as their full-time primary residences for the entirety of the Stone Age, the answer is largely no—the popular caveman image is a persistent myth built overwhelmingly on archaeological preservation bias rather than a genuine reflection of how most ancient humans organized their daily lives. They overwhelmingly lived outside in the open air, using caves temporarily, seasonally, and for genuinely important cultural and spiritual purposes. 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 specifically designed for extended, sustained habitation by thousands of people at a time, the answer is an emphatic, thoroughly documented, and genuinely extraordinary yes.
From the 18 levels of Derinkuyu sealed behind rolling stone doors during Byzantine sieges, to the dugout homes of Coober Pedy carved into Australian sandstone to escape desert heat, to the yaodong dwellings of China’s Loess Plateau still housing millions of people well into the 21st century, humans have been going underground for as long as the specific pressures of their environment gave them a compelling enough reason to start digging downward rather than building upward. The Earth makes a genuinely excellent home when the surface doesn’t. It stays cool when the ground above bakes under relentless sun, and it stays warm when the surface freezes under months of winter ice. It hides you completely from anyone who doesn’t already know exactly where to look.
And it requires no construction material beyond the ground you’re already standing on—available everywhere, costing nothing, and patiently waiting beneath your feet for the entire span of human history. All you have to do is start digging.