Evolutionary Nostalgia and the Romance of Origins

Abstract

This concluding chapter surveys a proliferation of more recent histories of deep time, all of them taking the modern Geologic Time Scale as their starting point but diverging into the differing realms of ethnography, science fiction, climate fiction, literary scholarship, and discourse on the Anthropocene. Here, the main interest lies with deep time before geology, with a kind of language about the very ancient past that preceded and made possible the naturalized use of this metaphor in a scientific context. The chapter makes this argument on the basis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings newly attuned to the uncertainty around questions now associated with prehistoric and prehuman times. Time is only as deep as the narratives that mark its extent, and although geology now provides a paradigmatic context for other deep time narratives, this does not mean that deep time is sealed in the black box of geological reckoning. The chapter asserts that deep time can be traced to an imaginative space between prehistory and geology.