The Tsodilo Hills (Tswana: Lefelo la Tsodilo) are a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS), consisting of rock art, rock shelters, depressions, and caves in Botswana, Southern Africa.

UNESCO estimates that the hills contain 500 individual sites representing thousands of years of human habitation.

It is believed that ancestors of the San created some of the paintings at Tsodilo, and were also the ones to inhabit the caves and rock shelters.

[5] Dates taken from charcoal, ostrich egg shell, bone samples and the deposits ranged from the MSA to LSA.

[5]) LSA layers included hammer stones and grindstones, along with bone artifacts and mircolithics.

[3] Located on the northwest side of the Female Hill, this site gets its name from the depressions that have been ground into the shelter walls.

[6] The rock shelter site, dated from charcoal samples, had its earliest occupation at least 30,000 years ago.

Two of these sites, known as Divuyu and Nqoma, have evidence of Early Iron Age metal artifacts [7] Excavated from the two sites contained fragments of jewelry and metal tools, all made from iron and/or copper.

Jewelry pieces were from bangles, beads, chains, earrings, rings, and pendants, while tools included chisels, projectiles and arrow heads, and even blades.

[8] Many local peoples around the Tsodilo Hills have stories of times past that deal with the many painted caves and rock shelters at the site.

Oral traditions often tell of the Zhu people, a local San group, using rock shelters for protection from the elements or as ritual areas.

[5]One tale claims that hunters would come into the rock shelters to contact ancestors if a hunt was unsuccessful.

The Whites Paintings rock shelter may have been used as a camp during the rainy season as early as 70 – 80 years ago.

[10] In 2006 the site known as Rhino Cave became prominent in the media when Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo stated that 70,000-year-old artifacts and a rock resembling a python's head representing the first known human rituals had been discovered.

They point out that the indentations (known by archaeologists as cupules) described by Coulson do not necessarily all date to the same period and that "many of the depressions are very fresh while others are covered by a heavy patina."

They also discuss the burned Middle Stone Age points, saying that there is nothing unusual in using nonlocal materials.