Cultural Transmission and the Social Contexts of Technological Transitions during the Late Paleolithic of Korea

The onset of the Late Paleolithic period in Korea, represented by the appearance of stemmed points and blades, was a key event in the dispersal of modern humans in Northeast Asia. Previous studies have mainly focused on possible origin locations of these new technologies. The specific cultural processes of the appearance of stemmed points and blades have rarely been considered. We explore these cultural processes by applying a cultural transmission framework to investigate the social contexts of the emergence of these new technologies. Our main question is: what was the dominant mode of cultural transmission during this time of technological innovation in the Korean Late Paleolithic? Following Bettinger and Eerkens (1999), we evaluated models of guided variation and indirect bias using data from Korean assemblages containing stemmed points. To evaluate these models and understand the transmission processes, we computed correlation coefficients and coefficients of variation (CV). We found that information about the new technology was likely transmitted via guided variation with small contribution from indirect bias. Some attributes, including length and width, were transmitted with less variation while other attributes have more variation. Our results suggest that the dominant mode of cultural transmission for the earliest stemmed points was guided variation. A slight shift in the social context of transmission towards indirect bias was observed in the later chronological phase. We assume that individuals or groups developed stemmed points by experimenting with existing blade technologies and then copied crucial parts of a successful model to ensure the quality to optimize tool usage. As a result, the shape of stemmed points became more standardized among their social groups.