"Australia’s Aboriginal past currently extends to 50,000 years, an enormous span of time, but it is just one episode in the grander tale of humanity which can be traced into the millions of years. Our understanding of that ancient lineage was – and remains – almost totally dependent on archaeology, which only emerged as a recognised scientific discipline in the late nineteenth century. The origins of archaeology lay in a convergence of intellectual thought that commenced when geologists such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell began to seriously challenge widely-held beliefs concerning the age of the Earth. Hutton’s work on stratification, the superimposition of layers of rocks and sediments, was integral to the resulting synthesis. His principle of Uniformitarianism also served to show the deposition was an ongoing process, and coupled with Steno’s Law, whereby the lower the layer the older it is, became and remained a basic tenet of archaeological excavation"--Conclusion.
