Cultures from pre-history to modern times constructed domed dwellings using local materials. Although it is not known when or where the first dome was created, sporadic examples of early domed structures have been discovered. Brick domes from the ancient Near East and corbelled stone domes have been found from the Middle East to Western Europe. These may indicate a common source or multiple independent traditions. A variety of materials have been used, including wood, mudbrick, or fabric. Indigenous peoples around the world produce similar structures today.

The earliest domes were likely domed huts made from saplings, reeds, or timbers and covered with thatch, turf, or skins. Materials may have transitioned to rammed earth, mud-brick, or more durable stone as a result of local conditions. The earliest discovered remains of domed constructions may be four small dwellings made of Mammoth tusks and bones. The first was found by a farmer in Mezhirich, Ukraine, in 1965 while he was digging in his cellar and archaeologists unearthed three more. They date from 19,280–11,700 BC.

More recently, semi-subterranean dwellings of the Thule people, ancestors of the Inuit who were established in the Canadian Arctic by 1300 AD, were made of whalebone frames lashed together with hide straps in a parabolic dome shape covered with hides and blocks of sod and snow. The igloo, a shelter built from blocks of ice in a spiral, was used by the Inuit. The wigwam was made by Native Americans and covered with hides or bark. A kind of corbelled dome using lengths of wood was used by the Anasazi to cover some kivas between 900 and 1250. A similar technique is used in Afghanistan.

In developing countries, domes are often less expensive alternatives to flat or sloped-roofed construction because they use less material to enclose a given volume and provide a lower rate of heat transfer due to the reduced surface area. Domes made with loam are found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, almost always using mud-bricks or adobes. A way of building them without centering called the Persian dome technique has been used for centuries in Afghanistan. Although descended from a longer tradition, the examples of clay brick beehive domes at Harran, Turkey, have been dated to the 19th century AD, as are the dry stone trulli of Italy. The Efé people of central Africa construct similar structures, using leaves as shingles. The Himba people of Namibia construct "desert igloos" of wattle and daub for use as temporary shelters at seasonal cattle camps, and as permanent homes by the poor. Extraordinarily thin domes of sun-baked clay 20 feet in diameter, 30 feet high, and nearly parabolic in curve, are known from Cameroon. Turkic and Mongolian nomads have used domed tents covered in felt for at least a thousand years in central Asia, and to the early 1900s they were used from Anatolia to Mongolia.

The historical development from structures like these to more sophisticated domes is not well documented. That the dome was known to early Mesopotamia may explain the existence of domes in both China and the West in the first millennium BC. Another explanation, however, is that the use of the dome shape in construction did not have a single point of origin and was common in virtually all cultures long before domes were constructed with enduring materials. Sylvester Baxter wrote that domes were evidently of Persian origin, with those early Persian domes being thought by Pascal Coste to have been derived from hemispherical bent-pole hide tents of the nomadic Iliate tribe of Turkmens near the Aral Sea, and thought by Frederic Edwin Church to have been derived from an earlier use of brick dome-shaped huts like those he had seen in Turkey.

Small domes in corbelled stone or brick over round-plan houses go back to the Neolithic period in the ancient Near East, and served as dwellings for poorer people throughout the prehistoric period, but domes did not play an important role in monumental architecture. The discoveries of seal impressions in the ancient site of Chogha Mish (c. 6800 to 3000 BC), located in the Susiana plains of Iran, in the vicinity of the modern city of Dezful in Khuzestan province, show the extensive use of dome structures in mud-brick and adobe buildings, likely granaries. Other examples of mud-brick buildings that also seemed to employ the "true" dome technique have been excavated at Tell Arpachiyah, a Mesopotamian site of the Halaf (c. 6100 to 5400 BC) and Ubaid (c. 5300 to 4000 BC) cultures. Excavations at Tell al-Rimah have revealed pitched-brick domical vaults from about 2000 BC.

At the Sumerian Royal Cemetery of Ur, a "complete rubble dome built over a timber centring" was found among the chambers of the tombs for Meskalamdug and Puabi, dating to around 2500 BC. Set in mud mortar, it was a "true dome with pendentives rounding off the angles of the square chamber." Other small domes can be inferred from the remaining ground plans, such as one in the courtyard of Ur-Nammu's ziggurat, and in later shrines and temples of the 14th century BC. Some monumental Mesopotamian buildings of the Kassite period are thought to have had brick domes, but the issue is unsettled due to insufficient evidence in what has survived of these structures.

A Neo-Assyrian bas-relief from Kuyunjik depicts domed buildings, although remains of such a structure in that ancient city have yet to be identified, perhaps due to the impermanent nature of sun-dried mudbrick construction. However, because the relief depicts the Assyrian overland transport of a carved stone statue, the background buildings most likely refer to a foreign village, such as those at the foothills of the Lebanese mountains. The relief dates to the 8th century BC, while the use of domical structures in the Syrian region may go back as far as the fourth millennium BC. Likewise, domed houses at Shulaveri in Georgia and Khirokitia, Cyprus, date back to around 6000 BC.^{[citation needed]}