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Kilu Cave is a Paleoanthropological site located on Buka Island in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Kilu Cave is located at the base of a limestone cliff, from the modern coastline. With evidence for human occupation dating back to 30,000 years, Kilu Cave is the earliest known site for human occupation in the Solomon Islands archipelago. The site is the oldest proof of Paleolithic people navigating the open ocean i.e. navigating without land in sight. To travel from Nissan Island to Buka requires crossing of at least 60 kilometers of open sea. The presence of paleolithic people at Buka therefore is at the same time evidence for the oldest and the longest paleolithic sea travel known so far.
During the coldest part of the last Ice Age (28,000 to 18,000 years ago), Buka Island was part of a much larger island, Greater Bougainville, which connected the present-day islands of Buka, Bougainville, Shortland Islands, Choiseul Island, Santa Isabel and Nggela into one large, contiguous island; this large island was narrowly separated from Guadalcanal. At its maximum, Greater Bougainville would have had a total land area of around .
Reaching Kilu Cave required crossing the Wallace Line, reaching the Sahul and making further sea crossings to reach Greater Bougainville. Archaeologically, the people at Greater Bougainville appeared to live in relative isolation after arriving at the island, with the isolation possibly punctuated by the external introduction of Phalanger orientalis and Canarium indicum. This relative isolation ended with the arrival of the Lapita people.
After a hiatus during the end of the Pleistocene the cave is reoccupied more intensively during the Holocene from around 9,000 to 5,000 BP. The hiatus in occupation was most likely due to changes in the sea level that left Kilu Cave far away from the coastline. Some post-Lapita Buka phase pottery was also found at Kilu Cave in its upper layers after around 2,500 BP.
The bones of both reef and pelagic fish were found at Kilu Cave. While the bulk of the fish bone remains came from reef fish, about 20% of the fish bones from the Pleistocene layer came from pelagic fish. The pelagic fish bones came from the Scombridae, Coryphaena and Carangidae families. The most commonly found fish remains at Kilu Cave came from sharks. The shell assemblage was dominated by Nerita undata and Nerita plicata.
Several extinct species were discovered at Kilu Cave. The extinction and extirpation of various bird and mammalian fauna on Baku Island appeared to coincide with the arrival of the Lapita culture.
77 bird bones were recovered from the site. The bones came from 18 different species of landbirds, 7 of which are unspecified or now extinct and 11 of which are now extirpated from Buka Island. Five species of rat endemic to the Solomon Islands were identified. Two new species of rat, Solomys spriggsarum and Melomys spechti, were identified from fossil remains at Kilu Cave.
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