Moving in and moving out: Explaining final Pleistocene-Early Holocene hunter-gatherer population dynamics on the Korean Peninsula

Abstract

While adaptive responses to ecological settings have been the focus of traditional approaches to the spatial organization of mobile hunter-gatherers, social factors also affect the positioning of bands. Hunter-gatherers position themselves in locations not just to exploit food resources, but also to maintain a certain distance to neighboring bands. Hunter-gatherer spatial organization was an agglomerated consequence of balancing two behaviors: spacing and proximizing. Thus, any given band’s decision to relocate affects other bands’ positioning, possibly resulting in a domino effect on a regional scale. We explain population fluctuations in Korea from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the early Holocene. The population history of southern Korea is characterized by an increasing occupational density during the LGM and population decline in periods of climatic amelioration. Contrasting this pattern to the population fluctuations observed in the northern latitudes of continental East Asia, we suggest that population increase in southern Korea during the LGM resulted from the southward movement of a wider hunter-gatherer network. As sea levels rose during the post-LGM, the network moved to the north and bands on the southern Korean peninsula moved north to avoid isolation. This process explains depopulation on the peninsula during the post-LGM and early Holocene.