The nature of the Early to Late Paleolithic transition in Korea: Current perspectives

The Early to Late Paleolithic Transition in Korea: A Closer Look

“…Even the Shuidonggou site in Ningxia, northern China, is dominated by the traditional core and flake tools, with blades comprising only a small portion of the overall toolkit (Pei et al 2012). This supports the argument that, although blades (and later microblades) appear in the eastern Asian archaeological record after 40 ka, in many cases the Early Paleolithic core and flake tool industry continued to be present in the region up through the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum (Bae 2010;Bae and Bae 2012;Pei et al 2012).…”

“…A growing number of sites exist in Korea that can be assigned to the Late Paleolithic, but appear to be coeval or predate Shuidonggou (Bae 2010;Seong 2011;Bae and Bae 2012 (Seong 2011;Bae and Bae 2012), which in turn makes Jangheungri one of the oldest microblade sites in all of eastern Asia (Norton et al 2007). …”

“…The nature of the Early to Late Paleolithic transition in Korea was recently reviewed and critiqued (Bae 2010;Bae and Bae 2012). 4 Here, we contribute an array of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) samples analyzed in the Seoul National University AMS laboratory primarily between 2009 and 2012 (Table 1; see also Bae and Kim 2010).…”

“…One point recent papers have discussed (e.g. Norton and Jin 2009;Bae and Bae 2012) but perhaps did not emphasize enough is that there appears to be growing evidence to suggest that Shuidonggou in northern China, long considered the type site of the eastern Asian Late Paleolithic, may in fact not be the oldest site in the region. Thus, the evidence from Korea, at least some of which appears to predate Shuidonggou, may suggest an alternative route to the peninsula from Siberia, Mongolia, and/or other regions of northeast China.…”

Redating Shuidonggou Locality 1 and Implications for the Initial Upper Paleolithic in East Asia

“…In this scenario, these behaviors would then have been reintroduced ~36 cal ka by already well-established Siberian and Mongolian IUP groups who either migrated into East Asia or introduced IUP technologies via trade or some other medium of cultural transmission (e.g. Zam'atnin 1951;Bae and Kim 2010;Bae and Bae 2012). The second alternative considers the hypothesis developed by Seong (2006Seong ( , 2009, who argues that blade-based technologies commensurate with the IUP developed in situ in East Asia on the order of 40 cal kyr ago (see also a similar argument by Derevianko et al 1998 positing that the Siberian and Mongolian IUP evolved directly from the preceding late Mousterian).…”