Korea too has a Paleolithic period. Indeed, some thirty Paleolithic excavations indicate that Stone Age people lived throughout the Korean peninsula. Whether the Korean people of today are ethnic descendants of these forest foragers (500,000–10,000 bc) is uncertain. These people lived in cave dwellings, hunted, fished, and gathered vegetation. That they used fire we know from the remains of a hearth found at a late Paleolithic site in midwestern Korea. They made hand axes, choppers, points, scrapers, and gravers by chipping stone, and sometimes they also used bone and horn. Late Paleolithic people made crude figurines as well, and carved decorations of dogs or fish.

The era characterized by simple undecorated pottery (6000 bc) and villages with semisubterranean dwellings has been called the Neolithic, or Early Villages, period (6000–2000 bc). Then came the pointed-bottom or rounded-base gray combware period (around 4000 bc) – incised pottery decorated on the exterior with geometric patterns – followed by flat-bottomed pottery, often with wave and thunderbolt designs. The Early Villages people are not the former Paleolithic foragers but a new group of pottery producers from the north. Located mainly on river terraces or on the coast of the Eastern Sea and Yellow Sea in clusters, village sites contain pottery and chipped stone tools in or near semisubterranean dwellings heated by central hearths. At this time the major land animals were deer, boar, and antelope in the north and boar and dog in the south. These people lived by hunting, fishing, and shellfish gathering.