ABSTRACT
When, in 1890, Robert Etheridge wrote a provocative article titled ‘Has man a geological history in Australia?’ he followed a well-established argument. Nineteenth century European archaeologists used the existence of skeletons or artefacts in layers containing bones of long-extinct animals as evidence that humans lived long ago, when the environment was very different. Some stratigraphic associations of animal bones and human skeletons or artefacts were dubious, better explained by post-depositional perturbations (Chapter 2), but by the 1860s the discovery of sites with little post-depositional disturbance had convinced scientists that, long ago, early humans had lived with animals that are now extinct (Grayson 1983).
