Border Cave is situated in the Lebombo Mountains, on the border between South Africa and Swaziland. The Border Cave is considered as an extremely important archeological, and has yielded more than a million Stone Age artifacts, as well as some of the earliest modern Homo Sapiens remains ever discovered. The cave was first excavated by a farmer who thought that the floor of the cave was guano or bat dung, which serves as an effective fertilizer for crops. Instead of guano, the farmer discovered various fragments of human bone, which were forwarded to Professor Raymond Dart at the University of the Witwatersrand, who examined the specimens, and realized their great age.

After various tests and research, scientists have concluded that the cave had been inhabited from as far back as two hundred thousand years ago. Among the valuable finds discovered in the cave, was the body of an infant which dates back approximately one hundred thousand years. The infant had been painted with red ochre, and was buried with a shell ornament. Scientists recognize this as the oldest known deliberate burial on the African continent, and if such burial can be taken to mean a concern with the afterlife, it would be the earliest evidence of the emergence of religion as well.

Another important discovery in the Border cave was the thirty five thousand year old Lebombo bone. The Lebombo Bone is a portion of a baboon fibula, which has twenty nine notches cut into it resembling the calendar sticks still used by San people in Namibia, displaying the earliest known evidence of the emergence of a counting system. An interpretive centre has been established at the cave featuring various visual representations and models telling the story of pre-historic human existence at the cave, as well as of archaeological excavations since the 1930s.