Out of Eden Walk: Korea’s Stone Age

Paul Salopek: Here in South Korea — it changes around the world, of course, depending on when early Homo sapiens arrived on the scene — But here, these particular stone tools are between 46,000 years and maybe about 10,000 years old. So, quite a span. 

Yeah, I think pretty much what we call today the “Old World,” so it would be Africa, where we originated as a species about 300,000 years ago, a long time ago. And again, just to be clear, because often people get it confused, we’re talking right now about Homo sapiens, right? Our species. People who, if they sat down next to us at a restaurant, we wouldn’t notice any difference at all because it would be anatomically identical, or at least close. So, from 300,000 years ago till only about 11,000 years ago, it was all the Stone Age. And, you know, scientists break it up into different eras. But, basically, that was the Stone Age. As an archeologist told me recently here in Korea, he said, “Paul, if we take into account the length of our species’ time spent in the Stone Age, if we convert it to like one day, one 24-hour period, we spent 23 hours and 55 minutes of our species history in the Stone Age, and only the last five minutes in recorded history.”

You know, the Americas is still a bit of an enigma. The traditional consensus is that early, anatomically modern Homo sapiens crossed, you know, the Alaskan Siberia land bridge about 12,000 years ago. Some evidence is starting to show that they came even earlier, and it might have been a maritime migration in small, kind of, canoes along the coast, maybe as early as 20,000 years ago. There are these amazing sites in South America where more research is being done.

Well, basically, lots of blades, cores.  Back then, people made stone tools by taking what’s called a “core,” like a circular rock, and hitting it with a stone hammer — another generally circular rock — knocking off blades. Then, they would microchip those blades to turn them into points, cutters, scrapers or basically whatever you have in your kitchen cabinet to process food. When we go to Stone Age sites, we find that … it’s basically a kitchen, a Stone Age kitchen, with all the tools necessary to break bones, get marrow, strip hides off animals, cut open the big beasts and little beasts, you name it. 

Carolyn, here is one of the amazing things about human history — and it reflects on my project because, as you noted, I’m following the footsteps of these early anatomical, modern people around the world — [which] is that we know very little about them. They discovered the world for us. They traveled in bands of 25 to 40. [They] were hunter-gatherers, as you mentioned. They were women, men, old people, kids. What I like to remind my readers is that family units discovered the world and gave us the world. It wasn’t the mighty explorer, this kind of masculine, you know, patriarchal figure. Even children discovered the world for us. They were masters of surviving on the environment. These stone tools are precision instruments. Basically, they were brilliant at what they did. They weren’t primitive at all. 

Yeah, very mysterious stone. So, they dug up tens of thousands of stone tools, flakes, points, grinders and choppers. But they found this one remarkable stone. It’s about the size of a human hand. It’s long and elongated. It’s polished. But it has 23 very precisely spaced notches carved into its surface, almost like a ruler. So, the question is, “Is this our first yardstick?” This piece, I think, is between 18,000 and maybe 40,000 years old. It’s really, really, really old. And getting into the heads of the people who made it way back before written history is rather difficult today, right? What are people thinking? What is their imagination doing? What are they dreaming? We can only conjecture about what this was meant for, but I imagined, “God, this is the beginning of measuring out the universe, right?” That led to all this infrastructure I saw around me while walking down this river alley. From concrete superhighways to, you know, the microcomputer on my phone. Maybe it all started near Danyang on this muddy river in Korea.

Entire systems of knowledge, vast systems of knowledge that were deep and mysterious and highly skilled and multifaceted ass anything we have today … that’s gone. It’s vanished. We just mentioned, Carolyn, earlier that 99.5% of our history was built on stone tool technology. Stone tools carved open ecosystems for us to get energy through, you know, animal protein, to build our brains, to build cultures, to build our cities, eventually. But it’s all gone. How many people know how to make a stone tool today? Nobody, except a few archeologists. When I hold these in my hand, they vibrate with this hidden power of a lost way of life, which was nomadic. It was moving through landscapes like water. Not settled the way we are by agriculture, kind of rooted in place.

You know, I’m sitting in an inexpensive motel in Asia right now, looking around this room as I’m talking to you, And I’m not sure that anything much will survive 40,000 years the way these stone tools in Danyang did.