ENG-2007 — Page 489

History 413

major outside influences. There is little dispute, on the other hand, that the earliest cultures emerged from 4 000 BC and must be seen within the framework of a changing environment in which sea levels rose from depths of 100 metres below the present inexorably submerging vast tracts of coastal plain and forming basically the modern shoreline and ecology to which human groups had to adapt, or perish.

Archaeological excavations have revealed two main Neolithic cultures lying in stratified sequence. The final phase of Hong Kong's prehistory was marked by the appearance of bronze around the middle of the second millennium BC. Bronze artefacts seem not to have been in common use, but fine specimens of weapons, knives, arrowheads and halberds, and tools such as fishing hooks and socketed axes have been excavated from Hong Kong sites. There is evidence, too, in the form of stone moulds from Kwo Lo Wan on the original Chek Lap Kok Island, Tung Wan and Sha Lo Wan on Lantau Island and Tai Wan and Sha Po Tsuen on Lamma Island, that bronze was actually worked locally.

The Bronze Age pots have designs that often resemble the geometric patterns of the late Neolithic period, but with their own distinctive style, including the 'Kui- dragon' or 'double F' pattern so characteristic of the region during that period.

Early Chinese written records refer to maritime peoples living in China's southeastern seaboard as 'Yue'. It is possible, therefore, that at least some of Hong Kong's prehistoric inhabitants were from the 'Hundred Yue', as this diverse group of peoples was then commonly called.

The discovery of a prehistoric burial ground at Tung Wan Tsai North on Ma Wan Island in 1997 shed light on the ethnicity of prehistoric inhabitants in Hong Kong. Among the 20 graves discovered, 15 yielded human skeletal remains, seven skeletons were relatively well preserved. Study of the human bones revealed they belonged to Asian Mongoloid, early inhabitants whose features resemble that of inhabitants of the tropics.

A Neolithic stone-working site discovered at Ho Chung, Sai Kung, in 1999 was also significant. Scattered around a work floor, measuring about 200 square metres, were a number of stone cores, flakes, chipped stone tools such as oyster picks, carving tools and polished implements that included adzes, rings and slotted rings. The artefacts provide valuable data for the study of the stone-working technology of Hong Kong's Neolithic inhabitants.

To save the archaeological heritage from being destroyed by the impending construction of roads, a team of experts from Hong Kong and the Mainland dug up a site in Sha Ha, also in Sai Kung, between October 2001 and September 2002. The team, the largest ever mobilised in Hong Kong, comprised members of the archaeological institutes of Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan and Guangzhou and members of Hong Kong's Antiquities and Monuments Office. The findings not only helped complete the chronology of Hong Kong's ancient cultures, but also provided important clues to the kind of society that existed at the time and the way settlements formed in the Pearl River Delta.