The broader human history of the area goes back considerably further.

People have been living in what is now Kentucky for roughly 12,000 years, following the retreat of the glaciers and the megafauna that preceded them — the mastodons, the giant ground sloths, the American horses.

By 12,000 years ago, human communities were established in the region, hunting the rich game of the Eastern woodlands, fishing the Green River, and developing the knowledge of the local landscape that would eventually lead someone to look into the darkness at the cave’s historic entrance and decide to go further.

The people who explored and mined Mammoth Cave were from the Late Archaic and Early Woodland periods — archaeological categories that correspond, roughly, to the period from about 3000 BCE through about 200 BCE.