Prehistoric Korea is the era of human existence in the Korean Peninsula for which written records do not exist. It nonetheless constitutes the greatest segment of the Korean past and is the major object of study in the disciplines of archaeology, geology, and palaeontology.
Geological prehistory
Geological prehistory is the most ancient part of Korea's past. The oldest rocks in Korea date to the Precambrian. The Yeoncheon System corresponds to the Precambrian and is distributed around Seoul extending out to Yeoncheon-gun in a northeasterly direction. It is divided into upper and lower parts and is composed of biotite-quartz-feldspar schist, marble, lime-silicate, quartzite, graphite schist, mica-quartz-feldspar schist, mica schist, quartzite, augen gneiss, and garnet-bearing granitic gneiss. The Korean Peninsula had an active geological prehistory through the Mesozoic, when many mountain ranges were formed, and slowly became more stable in the Cenozoic. Major Mesozoic formations include the Gyeongsang Supergroup, a series of geological episodes in which biotite granites, shales, sandstones, conglomerates andesite, basalt, rhyolite, and tuff that were laid down over most of present-day Gyeongsang-do Province.
The remainder of this article describes the human prehistory of the Korean Peninsula.
Periodization
Historians in Korea use the three-age system to classify Korean prehistory. The three-age system was applied during the post-Imperial Japanese occupation period as a way to refute the claims of Imperial Japanese archaeologists who insisted that, unlike Japan, Korea had "no Bronze Age" and because Korea has always had an earlier documented start of civilization than Japan and Bronze Age Korea even influenced the formation of pre-Bronze Age Japan to Iron Age Japan.
Bissalmuneui or Jeulmun pottery period ("Neolithic") 8000–1500 BCE
Incipient 8000–6000 BCE
Early 6000–3500 BCE
Middle 3500–2000 BCE
Late 2000–1500/1000 BCE
Mumun pottery period ("Bronze Age") 1500/1000–300 BCE
Samhan / Proto–Three Kingdoms Period ("Iron Age") 100 BCE to 300 CE
There are some problems with the three-age system applied to the situation in Korea. This terminology was created to describe prehistoric Europe, where sedentism, pottery and agriculture go together to characterize the Neolithic stage. The periodization scheme used by Korean archaeologists proposes that the Neolithic began in 8000 BCE and lasted until 1500 BCE. This is despite the fact that palaeoethnobotanical studies indicate that the first bona fide cultivation did not begin until circa 3500 BCE. The period of 8000 to 3500 BCE corresponds to the Mesolithic cultural stage, dominated by hunting and gathering of both terrestrial and marine resources.
Korean archaeologists traditionally (until the 1990s) used a date of 1500 or 1000 BCE as the beginning of the Bronze Age. This is in spite of bronze technology not being adopted in the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula until circa 700 BCE, and the archaeological record indicates that bronze objects were not used in relatively large numbers until after 400 BCE. This does leave Korea with a proper Bronze Age, albeit a relatively short one, as bronze metallurgy began to be replaced by ferrous metallurgy soon after it had become widespread.
Paleolithic
The origins of this period are an open question but the antiquity of hominid occupation in Korea may date to as early as 500,000 BCE. Yi and Clark are somewhat skeptical of dating the earliest occupation to the Lower Palaeolithic.
At Seokjang-ri, an archaeological site near Gongju, Chungcheongnam-do Province, artifacts that appear to have an affinity with Lower Paleolithic stone tools were unearthed in the lower levels of the site. Bifacial chopper or chopping-tools were also excavated. Hand axes and cleavers produced by men in later eras were also uncovered.
From Jeommal Cave a tool, possibly for hunting, made from the radius of a hominid was unearthed, along with hunting and food preparation tools of animal bones. The shells of nuts collected for nourishment were also uncovered.
In Seokjang-ri and in other riverine sites, stone tools were found with definite traces of Palaeolithic tradition, made of fine-grain rocks such as quartzite, porphyry, obsidian, chert, and felsite manifest Acheulian, Mousteroid, and Levalloisian characteristics. Those of the chopper tradition are of simpler in shape and chipped from quartz and pegmatite. Seokjang-ri's middle layers showed that humans hunted with these bola or missile stones.