I think that /r/Anthropology might be a better place for this question. I do have some small contributions though. Aboriginal culture is rather broad though, so I'm sure there's a thousand more examples I don't know about.

First, some information I received from a botany professor of mine. I'll be crossing paths with this particular professor next week, I can ask him for a citation for this if you want one (fair warning, the paper may be in Danish).
When some West African slaves were brought to the Caribbean (I believe to the Danish West Indies, possibly the island of Saint Thomas) they were removed from their indigenous ecology which they had relied on for centuries. However, very shortly after their arrival they were observed by a Danish botanist harvesting edible and medicinal plants from the local forests, plants which they wouldn't have known from their home in West Africa and which they would not have been able to discover by simple trial-and-error. Upon further investigation, it was observed that these people had an extensive knowledge of botany and were able to recognize families of plants which were likely to be edible or poisonous or contain pharmacological active compounds such as alkaloids, even when placed in an unfamiliar ecosystem with unfamiliar plant genera and species.

I have two more examples, but their not historical (again, maybe post this in Anthropology). My first example comes from some inhabitants of the Amazon known as ribereños ("riparian"), mestizo, European, African and de-tribalized native communities speaking mixtures of Spanish and indigenous languages. A group of scientists interviewed a community of ribereños in the Peruvian Amazon about their classifications of different forest types, based on various factors such as flooding regime and tree species composition. They walked around the community and quantified the areas of forest that the ribereños classified as a given type and compared these to modern floristic classifications (based on the quantity of certain indicator species). The study found that traditional and modern classifications aligned very well, with traditional categories being more numerous and nuanced; e.g. in one floristic classification, Pebas/Intermediate, there were four traditional forest types which, taken as an group, always occurred exactly where the Pebas forest type occurred, but further subdivided it based on varies factors.

Halme, K. J. & Bodmer, R. E. (2007) Correspondence between scientific and traditional ecological knowledge: rain forest classification by the non-indigenous ribereños in Peruvian Amazonia. Biodiversity Conservation 16:1785–1801. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10531-006-9071-4

In another case study on mestizo communities in Mexico, women were interviewed about their knowledge of mushrooms which they gathered for consumption. They not only were very knowledgeable about the extensive number of mushrooms they collected, but they also would add new mushrooms to their diet, evaluating their safety by comparing them to mushrooms which they already knew to be edible, and then feeding small portions to dogs and observing them for symptoms. A bit rudimentary, but an experiment nonetheless! I can't find the PDF for this one on my computer, I can cite it for you tomorrow when I'm back on University wifi if you want.

Point being, I'm not sure about particle physics or geology, but aboriginal cultures knew, and know, a lot about ecology, biology, and phytochemistry. They need to in order to survive.