With the exploration of subterranean scenes, determining how to ensure the safety of subterranean pedestrians has gradually become a hot research topic. Considering the poor illumination and lack of annotated data in subterranean scenes, it is essential to explore the LiDAR-based domain adaptive detectors for localizing the spatial location of pedestrians, thus providing instruction for evacuation and rescue. In this paper, a novel domain adaptive subterranean 3D pedestrian detection method is proposed to adapt pre-trained detectors from the annotated road scenes to the unannotated subterranean scenes. Specifically, an instance transfer-based scene updating strategy is designed to update the subterranean scenes by transferring instances from the road scenes to the subterranean scenes, aiming to create sufficient high-quality pseudo labels for fine-tuning the pre-trained detector. In addition, a pseudo label confidence-guided learning mechanism is constructed to fully utilize pseudo labels of different qualities under the guidance of confidence scores. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our proposed domain adaptive subterranean 3D pedestrian detection method.