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Deep Time

by Simon Probst

Human history is embedded within much larger time frames, namely the history of the universe, the Earth, and evolution. These histories precede the existence of the human species and are most likely to continue after its disappearance. In a broad sense, the term deep time refers to these cosmological, geological and evolutionary time scales and conceptualizes their relation to human history and experience of time through the spatial category of depth. Despite its many connections to the study of natural history, the term is metaphorically charged and has never been used in a strictly scientific sense. Rather, as the term’s history shows, it serves as a linguistic prism for scholarly and cultural debates about the meaning of time scales beyond human history. 

The term was coined by US-American author John McPhee in his non-fiction book Basin and Range (1981), addressing the limits of human imagination in the face of geological time and testing literary strategies to make the experience of deep time possible. In academic debate, the term was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould’s study Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987). Referring to McPhee’s phrase, Gould (1987, 2) situated “the discovery of ‘deep time’”, meaning geological time, within a history of major scientific developments that, according to Sigmund Freud, forced human thought to acknowledge its own limitations: the Copernican revolution, evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis. Modern geological time, though it had early predecessors (e.g. in the 11th century, Chinese scholar Sen Kuo and Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina, or in the 16th century Danish universal scholar Nicolaus Steno) was developed as a consistent historical framework in the 18th and 19th century. As concepts from historiography were applied to the study of nature, the field of natural history emerged and the ‘evidence’ of past changes found in the rocks, serving as ‘natural archives’ could not be explained within the biblical time frame of 6,000 years that the church proclaimed as the age of the Earth. Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon is credited with being one of the first to expand the history of the Earth. In his Théorie de la terre (1748) and his famous Epoques de la nature (1788), Buffon speculated about a geological past of 75,000 years and a future of another 90,000 years. In his Theory of the Earth (1788), James Hutton developed conceptual foundations for the assumption of a dynamic and eventful geological past that extends far beyond human history. These views were popularized through John Playfair's Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) and by Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–1833), the idea of an independent Earth history was further consolidated. Regarding these intellectual developments, it is James Hutton’s remark that the “mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” that has become most consequential for their cultural interpretation.

Resonating with this expression of an abyssal experience, the genesis of the term ‘deep time’ is situated within a well-documented critical tradition (Braungart 2009). Within this scholarly, artistic, and literary tradition, geological time serves as means to argue against anthropocentrism, deconstruct human exceptionalism, or relativize human history, for example in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne (written 1873, published 1896) or Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Betrachtungen über die physikalischen Revolutionen unserer Erde (1793). In the 21st century, this critical dimension of geological time is being reconceptualized. With the concept of the Anthropocene, and the acknowledgment that modern societies significantly shape the course of Earth history, questions are raised about how the entanglements of everyday experience, the history of modernity, capitalism, colonialism and life on Earth can be studied, narrated, and imagined (Chakrabarty 2018). While taking into account the cognitive and cultural difficulties of representing deep time, Anthropocenic approaches, rather than focusing on the dichotomy between geological and historical time, highlight their complex relations (Gin et al. 2018). In British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s non-fictional book Underland. A Deep Time Journey (2019), this leads to a critique of relativistic notions of deep time, endorsing instead planetary history as a foundation for an ethics of the longue durée, based on interspecies responsibility and inheritance. In this contemporary horizon, new aspects of the cultural history of deep time are discussed, where planetary history was not only seen as a relativization of human history, but also as a history to be inherited, influenced and shaped by humans – an early “Anthropocene consciousness” (Kelly 2018, 9) emerging already in the 18th and 19th century alongside the discovery of deep time, displaying not humility but rather hubris.

As deep time has evolved into a core element of Anthropocene narratives, plays a central role in understanding our present planetary crisis, and is an important means in developing a posthuman understanding of history, a critical examination and evaluation of the concept of deep time itself seems necessary. While some, as geologist Marcia Bjornerud in her book Timefulness. How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018), see Earth history as a neutral foundation to rethink the present, scholars such as Kathryn Yusoff (2018) have demonstrated that the discipline of geology cannot claim a universal perspective but is implicated within histories of slavery, racism, and extractive capitalism, which served geological research and have been legitimized by it. Others have highlighted that the history of deep time is also a history of ‘colonizing the past’ (Shah and Stoffel 2024), where Earth history is constructed in a way to legitimize worldviews and serve the cultural needs of certain Western groups in their present. “Decolonizing prehistory” (Mackenthun and Mucher 2021) therefore requires not only to analyze and deconstruct colonial epistemologies within deep time discourses, but also to engage with Indigenous temporal knowledges. Not only are there rich oral cultural memories of geological events but, as Aboriginal philosopher Tyson Junkaporta, who thinks deep time through the ancestral lens of dream time, demonstrates in his book Sand Talk (2019), there are also resonances to discover across ontologies and traditions. In light of this critique, it is not self-evident to equate ‘deep time’ with modern geological (or cosmological) time. Though the term is an invention of the 20th century, and the scientific knowledge that inspired its coinage emerged in the 18th and 19th century, the idea of a world before and after the human species is by no means exclusively modern. Rather, it can be seen as a temporal dimension that is imagined and constructed through different cultural practices, onto-epistemologies, and institutions.

For the Environmental Humanities, the concept of ‘deep time’ plays an important role, as it offers critical perspectives on anthropocentric notions of time and history, opening up temporal horizons where history is shaped by a multiplicity of nonhuman actors and forces. It thus serves as a means to rethink not only human history but also literary and cultural legacies (Dimock 2006). In studying the cultural production of deep time, methods of the Environmental Humanities contribute to an understanding of how time beyond human history and its sources is constructed through culturally shaped scientific practices of making ‘natural archives’ legible, through the recourse to other non-historical sources such as ancestral knowledge and mythical landscapes, through visualizations (Rudwick 1976), and through literary strategies, metaphors, myths and narratives (Gould 1987). This interplay of diverse cultural practices can be analyzed and reflected with methods of the humanities to better understand, how societies embed their everyday lives, and human history within larger temporal frames, how deep time is enmeshed with ideology, (de)legitimizes present societies, inspires imaginaries of the future, and serves as a means of critique and reflection.

Bibliography

  • Braungart, Georg 2009. “Poetik der Natur. Literatur und Geologie. ” In: Natur – Kultur. Zur Anthropologie von Sprache und Literatur, edited by Thomas Anz. Mentis.
  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory 57(1): 5–32.
  • Dimock, Wai-Che. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Through Deep Time. Princeton University Press.
  • Ginn, Franklin, Michelle Bastian, David Farrier, and Jeremy Kidwell. 2018. “Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time.” Environmental Humanities 10 (1): 213–225. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385534.
  • Gould, Stephen Jay. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cyle. Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Harvard University Press.
  • Kelly, Jason M. 2018. “Anthropocenes: A Fractured Picture.” In Rivers of the Anthropocene, edited by Kelly, Jason M., Philip Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michel Meybeck. University of California Press.
  • Mackenthun, Gesa and Christen Mucher (eds.). 2021. Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in the Americas). University of Arizona Press.
  • Rudwick, Martin J. S. 1976. “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760–1840.” History of Science 14: 149–195.
  • Shah, Mira und Patrick Stoffel. 2023. “Die Kolonialisierung der Vergangenheit – zur Einführung.” Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 3, Special IssueDie Kolonialisierung der Vergangenheit: 5–29.
  • Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.