The west-facing cave is located about 100 m below the crest of the Lebombo mountain range.[2] The variable rates of weathering of the Lebombo's Jurassic rocks led to the cave's formation.[2][3]
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),[4] 1970–1975, and 1987 (Peter Beaumont). Lucinda Backwell and colleagues reopened the site in 2015, and are currently excavating and analyzing more archaeological materials.[5] 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.[6] Border Cave's remains include human remains, lithics, bone tools, botanical remains (i.e. grass bedding) and animal bones.[7][8][4]
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.[9] The site's human remains have led to debates on the timing of modern human origins in southern Africa.[1][10] 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.[11]