The section about glaciation integrated continental ice ages into the larger picture of the Quaternary Period that Lyell had built up in his earlier works.
He raised his charges in the pages of the weekly journal The Athenaeum, and pressed them with a vehemence that some of his colleagues found distasteful.
Lyell gradually changed the text of Antiquity of Man to blunt some of their criticisms, but throughout the process held that he had been wrongly accused.
Lyell's presentation and endorsement of the new evidence for human antiquity firmly established the theory as scientific orthodoxy.
His integration of both ice ages and a very old human race into the (geologically) recent history of the Earth was novel for its time, as was his presentation of archaeological data that from continental Europe.