The Time Detective's Toolkit — and 65,000 Years Under Your Feet
🎯 Today's mission briefing
We are learning what historians and archaeologists count as evidence — primary and secondary sources, artefacts, layers and dating — and using that toolkit on the deepest human history on Earth: Australia's.
You'll know you've got it when:
- I can classify sources as primary or secondary, and explain what each specific source can and cannot tell us
- I can describe, with documented evidence, how we know First Nations Peoples have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years — Madjedbebe, Lake Mungo and Budj Bim
- I can talk and write about First Nations cultures in the accurate tense: ancient AND continuing — the oldest continuous cultures in the world, with communities leading this research today
The sprint that puts the pyramids at the finish line
Connects to what your guest already knows and makes them curious. Activating prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of new learning.
Try this thought experiment before anything else. Stretch all of human history in Australia — at least 65,000 years of it — along a 100-metre sprint track, with the starting blocks at the deep past and the finish line at today. Jog the track. The pyramids of Egypt get built about 93 metres in. Ancient Rome rises and falls inside the last 4 metres. The First Fleet arrives about 36 centimetres from the line — roughly the length of your school ruler. Federation, both world wars, the internet and you: the last 19 centimetres. Everything you have ever called 'ancient history' is crammed into the final few strides of a race that, on this continent, had been running for tens of thousands of years already. Today's job: find out how on earth anyone can KNOW what happened way back down the track, where there are no books, no newspapers and no living witnesses. Spoiler: the answer is under your feet.