It sits near the Seret river, on a high plateau known as the Podolian Upland, and is one of several such caves in the region formed in gypsum.

When the Gestapo stormed the cave, the group was forced to relocate to Priest's Grotto; most survived the war, having hidden underground for nearly two years.

[2] Their ordeal was the subject of a 2007 book, The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story; and a 2012 documentary, No Place on Earth.

[3] Inside, the cave hosts the Museum of Trypillian Culture, displaying archaeological finds from the past 200 years.

Verteba Cave is located about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) from the village of Bilche-Zolote, Chortkiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine.

[5] During the 19th century, the land on which the cave sits was part of an estate owned by the Polish noble Sapieha family.

[8] Prince Leon Sapieha was part of the Anthropological Committee of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków and permitted Adam Kirkor to conduct the first explorations in 1876 and 1878.

[3] Beginning in 1996, Mykhailo Sokhatskyi from the Borshchiv Local History Museum has led periodic archaeological expeditions.

[11] On 12 October 1942,[12] 28 Jews from seven families fled from Bilche-Zolote and the nearby village of Korolivka to Verteba Cave, seeking refuge from mass executions by the Nazis, who had arrived the year prior.

[19] The eventual evaporation of the sea into separate lagoons left behind large deposits of gypsum, limestone, clay, and other layers of sedimentary rock.

One early group of scholars posits that it formed during the Early-Middle Pleistocene, through the erosion of underground streams fed by the nearby Seret, which bends close to the site.

[22] Verteba has gone through regular periods of heavy flooding by silt, creating undisturbed soil deposits even between the prehistoric human layers of occupation.

[24] About 5,000 years before present (BP), people began settling, farming, and ranching along the local rivers, building adobe houses and creating ceramic vessels.

[27] Most researchers agree that Verteba Cave was not used as a permanent residence and possibly functioned as a temporary shelter, or even a religious center.

[33] Their pots come in a variety of shapes and are characterized by their grooved, spiralling ornamentation and were painted with red, black, brown, and white pigments.

[32] However, dozens of ceramics and fragments from this era were found to have been imported from the neighbouring Badrazhy group, as well as the more distant Bodrogkeresztúr and Lublin-Volhynia cultures.

[35] Many samples of the Koshylovetska pottery group display patterns that are more characteristic of the Branzeni and Badrazhy assemblages within the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture.

Generally, most are sculpted standing up, with two legs that join together into one foot, and two eye holes carved into a disc-shaped head.

Several features of the Verteba Cave ceramics also reflect Anatolian and Balkan influences, which fits into a broader pattern of similar pottery that stretched as far as modern-day Poland.

The shape of the horns resembling a lyre suggests these were intended to represent aurochs, of which representations are found at various other worship sites in the Near East and elsewhere in Neolithic Europe.

[45] Human remains located at Verteba Cave, while mostly attributed to the Cucuteni–Trypillian occupation, also include individuals who lived before and after this time.

[51] Unlike the typical Cucuteni–Trypillian burials under house floors, the numerous individuals interred in the cave represent an unusual deviation.

[59] The two main theories about the motivations behind the rise in violence are either competition among neighbours for resources, or warfare between the Cucuteni–Trypillians and migrant groups moving in from the peripheries of their culture.

[60] At least four skulls had their brains removed post-mortem, which was performed either through the nose, eye sockets, or through drilling holes in the temporal bone or foramen magnum of the cranium; and was sometimes accompanied by the deposition of red ochre.

[62] These groups and their frequencies are consistent with Cucuteni–Trypillian and other Neolithic sites across central Europe during this time period, especially displaying similarities to the Funnelbeaker culture.

All except haplogroup U are thought to have arisen from migrations of Anatolian farmers into the Balkans and Mediterranean Europe before diffusing north into the central and northern reaches of the continent, and bringing agriculture with them.

Compared to the agricultural haplogroups, its presence at Verteba is rare, and suggests the local population had been largely replaced by the migratory groups.

A second set of Late Bronze Age remains had more similarities with the Bell Beaker culture, which was already extinct, than with any other group.

[66] Stable isotope analysis of human teeth recovered at the site suggested the cave's inhabitants grew up locally.