Deep Time at The Dawn of The Anthropocene

Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene
Author(s): Noah Heringman

Source: Representations , Vol. 129, No. 1 (Winter 2015), pp. 56-85
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2015.129.1.56
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NOAH HERINGMAN
Deep Time at the

Dawn of the Anthropocene
Man can have an influence on the climate he inhabits, and, in a manner, fix its
temperature at any point that may be agreeable to him; and, what is singular, it is
more difficult for him to cool than to heat the earth.
—Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Epochs of Nature (1778)
T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E P O S E S A R A D I C A L new answer to an old

question: where do humans fit in the story of deep time? As a new geological
epoch, the Anthropocene comes freighted with the Enlightenment origins
of the geological time scale, an escalation so profound that it dislocated
time itself into a spatial register: deep time. The urgency of this intellectual
history in the Anthropocene may seem less clear than the urgency of
remembering and disentangling the contingencies of a global political
economy built on fossil fuels. Still, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observed in
2009, ‘‘In the era of the Anthropocene, we need the Enlightenment (that
is, reason) even more than in the past.’’ One Enlightenment text, Buffon’s
Epochs of Nature, provides grounds for questioning Chakrabarty’s insistence
on the novelty of the Anthropocene, defined memorably by him as a time in
which ‘‘humans wield geological force’’ by virtue of anthropogenic climate
change. ‘‘In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlighten-
ment,’’ Chakrabarty contends, ‘‘was there ever any awareness of the geological
agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through
a b s t r a c t This essay argues that the concept of deep time is essential to the intellectual history of
the Anthropocene—the name widely (though not yet formally) used for our current geological epoch.
Buffon’s Epochs of Nature, one of the earliest secular models of geological time in Enlightenment
natural history, uses inscription as a metaphor to mark the advent of biological species, including
humans, in the course of earth history. The Anthropocene extends this project of writing ourselves
into the rock record. Buffon makes a productive interlocutor for the Anthropocene because he is one
of the first to examine climate change and related constraints on human agency in the context of deep
time. The essay examines Buffon’s natural history and associated Enlightenment discourses of
primitive art and culture to gain a purchase on the challenges of scale posed by the Anthropocene.
Rep re s ent a ti o ns 129. Winter 2015 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018,
electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 56–85. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy
or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/
56 reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2015.129.3.56.

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processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom.’’1 As my epigraph
shows, however, Buffon does construe freedom as geological agency
(‘‘heat[ing] the earth’’), signaling the critical potential of a history of deep
time in the Anthropocene. All too often civilization has presented itself as
the culmination or completion of geological and anthropological time. This
Enlightenment legacy is encoded in the very name of the Anthropocene.
Recalling it might help to make the Anthropocene less anthropocentric.
The cognate stories of deep time and the Anthropocene converge in the
present on what I will argue is a primary symptom of the new epoch, and
a part of its forgetting: evolutionary nostalgia.
Following John McPhee, Stephen Jay Gould and other theorists have
adopted the term ‘‘deep time’’ to mark the incommensurability between
geological and historical time scales, between the earth’s gradual changes
over hundreds of millions of years and the rapid changes occurring in even
a century of human history. Gould restores the concept to its own Enlight-
enment history, deriving deep time from temporalizing metaphors, including
the ‘‘book of nature,’’ that still measure geological time in the Anthropocene,
our newest epoch. In its secular form as a ‘‘geological record,’’ this metaphor
of inscription prompted Charles Darwin to reposition species within a ‘‘history
of the world imperfectly kept,’’ on an entirely different scale from the written
record.2 Among cultural critics such as Siegfried Zielinski and Mark McGurl,
who use the term more loosely, there is nevertheless a strong consensus that
deep time depends on the emergence of modern geology in the 1780s.3 This
essay revisits the association between deep time and the origins of geology in
light of current geological and ecological arguments that this same early
industrial decade also marks the dawn of the Anthropocene. The conver-
gence on this moment highlights the paradoxical entanglements of deep and
human time, and the confusions of scale, that these origin stories entail. Both
depend on a strong distinction—temporal as well as spatial—between the
primitive (‘‘primitive rocks’’ for early geology, primitive or Holocene humans
for the Anthropocene) and the modern. Deep time and the Anthropocene
both attest to the human imprint on geological time, not merely via environ-
mental impact (as the latter insists) but also in the form of an ethnographic
legacy, the idea of the primitive embedded within geological time itself.4
The current fascination with deep time slightly predates the Anthropo-
cene as a topic of discussion and might be seen as its antithesis, since the
concept of deep time presupposes the insignificance of human tenure on
the planet. The Anthropocene, on the contrary, is a proposed geological
epoch that will be uniquely recognizable to hypothetical observers up to five
million years from now from marks left by human environmental impact,
such as a ‘‘reef gap’’ in the marine fossil record caused by acidification of the
oceans (caused in turn by CO2 emissions). The term was introduced in the
Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene 57

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scientific literature in 2002 and proposed as a formal revision to the geo-
logical time scale in 2008.5 Although the Anthropocene may be opposed to
deep time in fundamental ways, both effectively make our epoch incom-
mensurable with other geological epochs. Both might even be diagnosed as
symptoms of what Daniel Lord Smail has identified as a ‘‘resistance to the
idea of a deep history,’’ since both depend on radical discontinuity.6 My
starting point is to define the Anthropocene more simply as an act of writing
ourselves into the rock record. Even in its secular form, this metaphor
implies a kind of textual materiality in geological events, referred to in this
essay as ‘‘inscription,’’ to suggest its relationship to the semideliberate plan-
etary ‘‘carbon footprint’’ that marks our epoch.7
The key date for Paul Crutzen and other scientific proponents of the
new epoch is 1784, a year associated with James Watt’s steam engine and
a rise of carbon emissions significant enough to leave a durable mark.8
Among Watt’s contemporaries, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
stands out for positing a form of anthropogenic geological inscription that
may be correlated culturally as well as chemically with the rising CO2 levels
that are now legible in ice cores as traces of industrialization. Buffon con-
cludes Epochs of Nature (1778) by outlining an ‘‘Epoch seventh, and last,—
When the power of Man assisted the operations of nature.’’9 He was notorious
in his own time for entertaining a long geological time scale that turned out
to be much more generous than that allowed by science (scriptural or other-
wise) until much later. In the 1960s, Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield
singled him out as a ‘‘pioneer’’ in the ‘‘discovery of time.’’10 My purpose in
tracing the Anthropocene to Buffon as well is not simply to argue that deep
time and the Anthropocene both originated in the same historical moment,
but rather to illustrate their formal affinities as binary chronologies. Deep
time lies beyond and between the legible portions of the rock record and
must be reconstructed in broad strokes. The Anthropocene localizes geolog-
ical time, setting the deeper past aside to focus on recent inscriptions of
environmental change and even human records. Both binaries, however,
leave open a large middle ground of evolutionary time and antiquity, often
organized in turn by the same pattern of ‘‘deep’’ versus retrievable pasts. In
this context, the concept of the Anthropocene gains some of the historical
depth so far attributed only to the geological epoch itself.
Buffon makes fossil fuels central to his seventh or human epoch, and his
natural history also provides a bridge to the theory of human evolution and
its Anthropocene cultural manifestation as evolutionary nostalgia. Darwin
himself believed that the extremity of South America was populated by
‘‘savages of the lowest grade’’ and ‘‘strewed with great fragments of primitive
rocks.’’ The figure of a geological record, in its influential Darwinian form,
is one temporalizing strategy among many that predates and in some way
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prefigures the Anthropocene.11 The deep human (or evolutionary) past is
a prerequisite for the Anthropocene in its current form because it distin-
guishes the evolved human present categorically from the geo- and biospheri-
cally determined moment of human origins. The deep time conceptions
originating in the later eighteenth century definitively separate prehuman
from human time, yet continuing attempts to bridge or resuture these two
time scales figuratively—from Buffon through Darwin down to McPhee’s
images of telluric ‘‘violence . . . on an epic scale’’—suggest an undiminished
drive to locate history in cosmic time, a project of which the Anthropocene is
only the most recent expression.12 Objectively speaking, the Anthropocene is
a new epoch, but inhabiting it requires renewed engagement with the histor-
ical processes that condition lived experience in the new epoch, processes
ranging from resource exhaustion to the development of the geological time
scale itself.
Buffon’s Epochs is one of the earliest histories of the earth to invoke deep
time in the sense in which it is now most commonly understood, as geolog-
ical in contradistinction to historical time. At the same time, it is close
enough to the Enlightenment genre of conjectural history to explain why
the expression continues to invite metaphorical uses today, such as ‘‘litera-
ture through deep time’’ (Wai Chee Dimock) or ‘‘the deep time of the
media’’ (Zielinski). It makes sense to reserve ‘‘deep time’’ in the strict sense
for geological discussion, since the recognition of earth history, as differing
from other histories in scale, depends on it. Temporal ‘‘depth,’’ however,
comes to geology as a metaphorical legacy along with others, such as (follow-
ing Gould) ‘‘time’s arrow’’ and ‘‘time’s cycle,’’ and analogies between geolog-
ical and other orders of ‘‘deep’’ time remain essential to the histories of
species and civilizations. The Anthropocene names an encroachment of
human history on the deep time of geology, and to the skeptic this encroach-
ment may well signal category confusion.13 Buffon himself invokes the paleo-
anthropological and art-historical registers of deep time in constructing his
innovative geological time scale, and my reading keeps these registers in play
because they are resurfacing powerfully at a time when human and natural
history seem again to be collapsing into one. Theorists in the Anthropocene
(such as Smail) are likewise turning to human antiquity, or prehistory, to
locate a threshold for contemplating human and prehuman scales at once.
The ‘‘dark abyss of time,’’ as both a scientific and a humanistic topos, is
independent of scale to some degree. The discourse of literary and artistic
belatedness provides a secular scale on which a lapse of just two thousand
years, as in neoclassicism, or even shorter periods, can seem an insur-
mountable gulf. Henry Fuseli’s The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur
of Antique Fragments (fig. 1) juxtaposes the present against the deep past of
art, a variant of deep time as signaled by the inhuman scale of its works and

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by its irretrievable traces—that is, both the illegible inscription on the
pedestal (lower left) and the colossal hand and foot conventionally seen
as conveying ‘‘the burden of the past.’’14 Like the Anthropocene, this
image of an epoch monumentalizes the human capacity for making signs
and leaving marks, allegorized here in the reduction of an ancient sculp-
ture to the organs of colossal mark-making associated with a hegemonic
past.15 While Fuseli’s scale shift is comparatively small, it arguably lays
claim to absolute magnitude by positioning his own modern agency, bur-
dened by overwhelming constraints, against the artistic immortality of
a titanic ancient race visually assigned to an earlier age of the earth. The
dark abyss threatening this picture from the right is much closer to the
inhuman temporality of Buffon’s earth than is ‘‘the dark backward and
abysm of time’’ that we find earlier, in The Tempest, where it refers to
Miranda’s nearly irretrievable memories of her early childhood. Shake-
speare scales the figure down even further to the Ages of Man.16 The key
difference is that Enlightenment naturalists began to approach fossils as
‘‘the antiquities of the earth,’’ or what Buffon calls ‘‘the archives of
nature’’—a consciously heuristic analogy that presumes two different time
scales, the human and the geological.17 The Enlightenment discourse of
deep time, as I hope to show, is a reciprocal engagement between anti-
quarianism and natural history.
figure 1. The Artist Moved to

Despair at the Grandeur of
Antique Fragments, 1778–80, by
Henry Fuseli. Red chalk and
brown wash on paper.
Kunsthaus Zürich.
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The famous opening of Epochs of Nature compares the fossil ‘‘archives of
nature’’ with deeds, coins, and ‘‘ancient inscriptions.’’ This pervasive and
productive homology enabled the retrieval of nature’s revolutions from the
‘‘dark abyss of time,’’ as Paolo Rossi has shown.18 Deploying the nascent
visual language of geology, if not its empirical methods, Buffon argues that
each epoch has its geological signature. Stratigraphers of the Anthropocene
insist on the anthropogenic carbon signature as a legitimate boundary for
a geological epoch. The model of inscription carries over from natural
history into geology and operates across scales, unlike Bruno Latour’s ‘‘mod-
ern constitution’’ or Michel Foucault’s ‘‘discontinuity of living forms,’’ both
of which situate the modern/premodern binary entirely within the histor-
ical time of human agency.19 From the geological perspective of deep time,
modernity begins with the Cenozoic Era, named after the ‘‘young life’’ that
sprang up after the renovating asteroid impact of 66 million years BP. On
the more local scale of epochs, both the Pleistocene and the Holocene mark
human time, but human evolution does not provide the main criteria for
dating either. Only the Anthropocene, if the International Commission on
Stratigraphy makes it official in 2016, will depend centrally on human
inscription, but even here modernity is understood through the capacity
of differentially resistant media (the atmosphere, polar ice, coral reefs) to
manifest traces of human inscription.20
In the Anthropocene context, ‘‘inscription’’ refers not only to the topos
of the rock record and to language but also to literal ground. The Anthro-
pocene hinges on a recognition of the unsuspected geological agency of
human beings, apparently quite the opposite of the impotence displayed by
Fuseli’s artist. The figure of inscription, however, unites these and other
iterations of the deep time scenario; both position modernity in relative
terms as human interaction with a resistant medium. The human agency
behind increases in atmospheric carbon, as registered in ice cores, is man-
ifestly different from the agency of the Greek sculptor but still cannot be
readily imagined without the figures of inscription, including the ‘‘rock
record’’ itself. Taken together, the various senses of ‘‘inscription’’ also register
a kind of distributed agency that is appropriate to environmental history.
Buffon makes a productive interlocutor for the Anthropocene because
he is one of the first to examine these constraints on human agency in the
context of deep time. Although he argues that these constraints are sur-
mountable, his biogeographic view of social development, and particularly
his emphasis on climate change, eerily anticipate our preoccupation with
environmental changes that now seem all too insurmountable. More funda-
mentally, thinking the Anthropocene means thinking about scale historically
as a language that determines how we formulate our origins as well as our
‘‘profound disadvantage in the face of time,’’ as McGurl calls it.21 This essay

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presents three cases—Buffon’s natural history of climate change and, more
briefly, neoclassical models of the origins of art and evolution-tinged contem-
porary popular culture—in which the resolution of scale depends on the
presentation of origins in material form: fossils in natural history; primitive
works of art in the early human sciences; and ancestral humanity, anchored
by Darwin’s first evolutionary synthesis and anthroposcenically evoked by
barefoot shoes and paleo diets in our popular culture of evolutionary nostal-
gia. Evolutionary nostalgia defiantly unsettles the hard distinction between
the Anthropocene and earlier epochs by insisting on a biologically intact
Holocene human identity.
II
It’s hard enough to get the public to accept climate change,

notes the lead article in a 2011 special issue of Philosophical Transactions
Series A entitled ‘‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?’’
Given challenges to the political meaningfulness of climate change by
theorists such as Eric Swyngedouw, it is an open question what Anthropo-
cene politics might mean, if and when the concept gains broader currency.
Sir Crispin Tickell’s meditation on so-called societal responses to the
Anthropocene in the special issue is bland enough to bear out Swynge-
douw’s skepticism.22 Thinking about scale historically will not reduce any-
one’s carbon footprint, but it does bring climate change into focus as
a form of what Rob Nixon calls ‘‘slow violence,’’ and formal recognition
of the Anthropocene may prove a breakthrough for scientific activism.
Crutzen, Jan Zalasiewicz, and other leading proponents of the Anthropo-
cene have repeatedly touched on the longue durée of the concept. Before
Crutzen launched the current debate with his 2002 article in Nature, other
scientists had taken formal notice of epoch-making human environmental
impacts; Antonio Stoppani in the 1870s and Vladimir Vernadsky in the
1920s are the most prominent of those surveyed by Will Steffen and his
co-authors in the special issue. Finding a start date for the epoch itself is
even trickier, with estimates ranging from before the Holocene agricultural
revolution to the industrial revolution and after. While consensus favoring
the latter is quite robust, the choice of 1784 because of Watt and the steam
engine remains somewhat arbitrary and undertheorized. These geo-
chronologies, from Buffon to the present, face several of the narrative
‘‘challenges of scale’’ described by Nixon, particularly the ‘‘challenges of
catastrophic miniaturism.’’23 Returning to Buffon’s self-conscious engage-
ment with these challenges offers the Anthropocene, if nothing else,
a more robust theoretical starting point.
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Buffon’s Epochs of Nature first appeared in 1778, anticipating Watt’s
steam engine by six years but close enough in time to warrant a provisional
association between the geological epoch and a historical epoch of reflection
on the environmental history of the species. To risk an anachronism, we
might say that Buffon’s version of the Anthropocene extends both to the
phenomenon itself (the epoch) and to its concept (the reflection). He offers
the concept of a geological period defined by human agency (Epoch Sev-
enth) and grounds it empirically in the growing use of fossil fuels. (If Buffon
noticed a correlation between this trend and changes in air quality—as some
of his contemporaries did—it did not shake his belief in progress.)24 Buffon
also demonstrates the correlation between primal geology and primitive peo-
ples that I am proposing as evidence for the entanglement of deep and
human time (Epoch Fifth). Here is his abstract:
EPOCH FIRST.
When the Earth and Planets first assumed their proper Form.
EPOCH SECOND.
When the fluid matter consolidated, and formed the interior rock of the
globe, as well as those great vitrifiable masses which appear on its surface.
EPOCH THIRD.
When the waters covered all the Continents.
EPOCH FOURTH.
When the waters retired, and Volcanos began to act.
EPOCH FIFTH.
When the elephants, and other animals of the south, inhabited the northern
regions.
EPOCH SIXTH.
When the Continents were separated from each other.
EPOCH SEVENTH, and last.
When the power of Man assisted the operations of Nature.
In his preliminary discourse, Buffon deduces these epochs from five axiom-
atic geophysical facts and five ‘‘monuments’’ (fossil bones and shells)
intended to secure his goal of ‘‘form[ing] a chain which, from the summit
of the time scale [du sommet de l’échelle du temps], shall descend all the way to
our present.’’25 The chain that links these seven revolutions—indebted met-
aphorically if not substantially to sacred history—is forged of geological
evidence. A quasi-geological series of inscriptions enables the retrieval of
widely distributed agencies—human, mammoth, volcanic—from the ‘‘dark
abyss of time.’’26 Buffon’s strong antiquarian interest in inscriptions, his
half-ironic allusion to the Great Chain of Being, his early use of ‘‘time scale,’’
and even his anthropocentrism—all these merit particular notice in the
Anthropocene context.
Situating the history of species, particularly the human species, in deep
time, for Buffon means downplaying the origin of life as well as the diversity

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of prehuman life. Of the individual chapters in the Epochs, only the third
touches on the origins of life and attempts some general description of the
emergence of life forms. These seemingly epochal events do not qualify for
inclusion in Buffon’s abstract, however, in which only elephants (that is,
mammoths) and ‘‘Man’’ meet the criteria for epoch-making activity. In the
chapter we learn that the primordial ocean very soon produced marine
organisms, ‘‘the first inhabitants of the globe,’’ whose fossil shells Buffon
regards as being deposited in situ and marking the highest ocean level.
Terrestrial life, especially plants, came into existence at about the same
time, roughly 35,000 years BP, on the exposed mountain peaks. But even
though he says that ‘‘Nature spread the principles of life’’ from the sea to the
exposed land, Buffon attempts no explanation of how these ‘‘innumerable’’
early creatures ‘‘took their birth’’ (ont pris naissance), as he puts it in a typi-
cally vague formulation.27 He turns to the subject of human life first at the
end of his discussion of Epoch Fifth, indicating that human beings received
‘‘the breath of life’’ last of all, but not long after the mammoth and other
megafauna of the mountains of northern Asia, and in the same place. This
biblical language and the implied analogy between the epochs and the
seven days of Creation (not in itself original to Buffon) did little to mitigate
this radical departure from biblical chronology, and we should not be mis-
led by the lower magnitude of Buffon’s expansion (from thousands to tens
of thousands, rather than the billions of years we now expect) into missing
the depth of his ‘‘dark abyss of time.’’ Nor was he ‘‘moved by religious
motives when he lowered his estimates’’ of the age of the earth in moving
from manuscript to print; ‘‘for theologians, 75,000 years was as scandalous as
ten million,’’ in Jacques Roger’s words.28
The association between early hominids and megafauna not only back-
dates humans by dissociating them from modern animals; it is also Anthro-
pocene in the sense that a time of human origins is distinguished from
a time of human sovereignty, which in Buffon receives an epoch of its own.
Just as theorists of the Anthropocene have explored start dates as far back as
the late Pleistocene but largely settled on the Industrial Revolution (Buf-
fon’s time), so too does Buffon entertain possible dates for Epoch Seventh
as far back as 7000 BCE before finally settling on about 1000 BCE (while also
noting the perfection of human control in his own present day). He begins
his final chapter by outlining a savage state that evidently dates back to the
end of Epoch Fifth, making it roughly contemporaneous with the giant
fossil bones that Russian and American naturalists had been sending to
Buffon in his capacity as director of the Royal Cabinet (now the Museum
of Natural History in Paris). Epoch Sixth calls for human migrations post-
dating the separation of the continents and corresponds in some ways with
much later ideas of human prehistory.29 The proper start date of Epoch
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Seventh—added in 1776, seemingly after the work was already complete in
six epochs—clearly postdates early human evolution for Buffon. In a series
of thought experiments he entertains origins progressively closer to the
present. Epoch Seventh might begin with the ‘‘great increase in population’’
that succeeded the band-level organization of hunter-gatherer societies—
a form of organization that Buffon, in a classic temporalizing move, illus-
trates as ‘‘still the condition of those savages who live independently,’’ like
the Hurons of North America. These ‘‘little nations’’ of ‘‘men just emerging
from the state of nature’’ first gave way to population centers in ‘‘the north-
ern countries of Asia’’ perhaps nine thousand years ago: ‘‘From this moment
the earth became the inheritance of man. He took possession of it by his
labour and cultivation.’’30 The temporalizing equation of modern ‘‘savages’’
with prehistoric ones—a strategy inherited by Darwin and his contempor-
aries as the ‘‘comparative method’’ in anthropology—allows Buffon to
amplify distance in time via cultural difference. Unlike a description of
progress from the pastoral to the agricultural stage of civilization, Buffon’s
account incorporates these human revolutions with the deep history of
nature.31
Geochronology provides a measure of stability for this unsteady cultural
genealogy of early humans. The ‘‘convulsive motions of the earth’’ that still
terrified the first humans or hominids lingered in memory and slowed their
‘‘emerg[ence] from the state of nature’’ as the planet continued to cool.
Moreover, the first civilization’s ‘‘possession’’ of the earth would have been
merely temporary, since, as Buffon argues, it would have been totally
destroyed by barbarians encroaching from the north as the subarctic
regions became too cold to inhabit. Buffon estimates the intervening Dark
Ages at another three millennia, inferring that ‘‘hence about three thou-
sand years only have elapsed since the power of man united with that of
Nature, and spread over the greatest part of the earth.’’ Roughly 1000 BCE
therefore provides another putative start date for the Anthropocene, or, in
retrospect, of a second, more durable Anthropocene phase, since ‘‘the whole
face of the earth at present [1778] exhibits the marks of his power.’’32 Buffon
thus sets human time proper against a deeper (or medial) past in which
humans still had to contend with the dynamic processes of a young earth
in formation. The human epoch depends on the durable marks left by agri-
culture, and perhaps ‘‘at present’’ by burgeoning industry, but it also depends
on the changing resistance of the earth as medium, or its domestication.
In the absence of any clear (archaeological) concept of prehistory, Buf-
fon shows understandable ambivalence about the period between his two
alternative start dates, a time with no historical record. Following the latest
antiquarian scholarship, Buffon reclassifies the so-called thunder-stones
(previously understood as natural phenomena) as flint tools and weapons

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made by the first ‘‘independent savages.’’ This diachronic narrative is com-
plicated by a synchronic Enlightenment alarm concerning superstition. The
fear of earthquakes lingers, and ‘‘even at present, men are not entirely
emancipated from these superstitious terrors.’’33 Though Buffon’s account
is pejorative, this lingering terror anticipates in some ways the idea of evo-
lutionary memory that is, in my view, embedded in the Anthropocene, an
epoch that looks back to a stage of human evolution characterized by a more
modest ecological footprint. Buffon’s insistence that early but temporary high
civilizations in northern Asia followed this barbarous stage—despite the lack
of written records—might be seen as an early experiment in ‘‘deep history,’’
which Smail defines as reaching seamlessly from the archival record into the
evolutionary past. (Deep history, too, offers us a kind of middle distance
between history and deep time in its purely geological sense.)
Buffon has an incipient sense of fossil and archaeological evidence, but
no sense (of course) of DNA evidence, to name the three kinds of deep
historical inscription on which Smail builds his argument. Buffon’s insis-
tence on ‘‘monuments’’ as evidence owes something to the affinities
between natural history and antiquarianism. Presenting origins in material
form, his foundational monuments—giant fossil bones in northern lands
and in both hemispheres as well as shells far from the sea, not always match-
ing living genera—establish the unique geohistorical importance of fossil
evidence, and his discussion of stone tools recognizes what would later be
regarded as archaeological evidence. Buffon’s reliance on an astronomical
calculation, ‘‘the lunisolar period of 600 years’’ alluded to by Flavius Jose-
phus, as his sole evidence of a high prehistoric civilization, looks flimsy next
to Smail’s provocative use of genetically based paleo-anthropological
research. But like Smail, Buffon has a sense that too sharp a divide between
premodern and modern humans might derail the project of incorporating
the human epoch into the epochs of nature.34
Nonetheless, Buffon cannot resist the appeal of a human-dominated
epoch. One mark stands out preeminently among the ‘‘marks of his power’’
now exhibited by ‘‘the whole face of the earth’’: climate change. Buffon
reasons as follows: ‘‘As every action, every movement, produces heat, and
as all beings endowed with the faculty of progressive motion, may be con-
sidered as so many little fires,’’ it follows that ‘‘the local temperature of each
particular country depends’’ on ‘‘the number of men and animals’’ inhabit-
ing it. After surveying the microclimates of the Paris suburbs to introduce
his subject, Buffon concludes decisively that
many other examples might be given, all concurring to show that man can have an
influence on the climate he inhabits, and, in a manner, fix its temperature at any
point that may be agreeable to him; and, what is singular, it is more difficult for him
to cool than to heat the earth.35
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Buffon does, in fact, extend the scope of this ultimately global argument,
which becomes the main focus of his chapter on the seventh and final
epoch. His sultry and populous earth seems appropriate for the dawn of
the Anthropocene—or the culmination of the ‘‘natural history of man,’’ to
use the vocabulary of that period. His interest in atmospheric physics and
natural processes in general—as much as he overstates human environmen-
tal impact—distinguishes Buffon’s account from the stadial histories of civil
society. This fantasy of civilization as a furnace clearly portrays an agrarian
society, but it also carries evidence of urbanization, the concentration of
humans and draft animals that made warming more efficient.
Directly and indirectly, this inscription of progress operates at the
expense of ‘‘savages’’ ancient and modern, who impede the project of world
domination. Famously, Buffon used the lower population density of non-
European places as evidence for a biogeographic and racial hierarchy of
populations. A peculiar return to myth that might serve to distinguish Buf-
fon’s from other typical Enlightenment projects—a ‘‘recursive moment,’’ to
use the well-known vocabulary of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—
arises with his notion that resource extraction benefits nature, already
hinted at in the chapter heading for the seventh and final epoch: ‘‘When
the power of Man assisted [a secondé] the operations of Nature.’’ This new
myth provides his ideological justification for the ‘‘total domination of
nature and of humans’’ that Enlightenment aims for, according to Adorno
and Horkheimer’s critique.36 Buffon himself protests that colonialism is
only an unfortunate byproduct of biodiversity. Whether or not we take social
inequality as incidental, the physics of climate change provides the infra-
structure: ‘‘It is upon the difference of temperature that the stronger or
weaker energies of Nature depend. . . . Hence man, by modifying this cause,
may in time destroy what injures him, and give birth to everything that is
agreeable to his feelings.’’ By ‘‘multiplying [domestic] animals,’’ Buffon
further explains, ‘‘he augments the quantity of life and motion on the
surface of the earth; he, at the same time, improves the whole race of beings,
and ennobles himself, by transforming the vegetable into the animal, and
both into his own substance.’’37
Because domesticated species are ‘‘more useful to the earth,’’ climate
change becomes an ethical project as well. Buffon dismisses living non-
European peoples on this basis: ‘‘These brutish men, these unpolished
nations, great or small, give no support to the Earth.’’ Critics beginning with
Thomas Jefferson have shown Buffon’s theories of climate and race to be
thoroughly complicit with colonialism, though it is also worth noting his
explicitly anticolonial sentiments at the close of Epochs of Nature. In Alan
Bewell’s reading, Buffon’s idea of ‘‘brutish men’’ implies that colonial
nature ‘‘not only needs but wants to be civilized.’’ Hinting at the longue durée

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of this climate-change mentality, Bewell further notes that ‘‘Americans did
not simply reject colonial biogeography, they learned instead to employ it
for their own expansionary purposes.’’ Smail and Andrew Shryock, however,
implicate the whole species by insisting that ‘‘scalar leaps in extractive capac-
ity’’ have been a recurring pattern since the Paleolithic.38
Buffon also believes that resource extraction ‘‘assists’’ nature in the more
encompassing sense that it enables the progressively fuller inscription of life
onto the planet. The earth, for Buffon, originated in molten form, and its
subsequent history can only unfold as a gradual, inevitable cooling. Living
beings strive to slow this cooling and enjoy considerable success—this is one
reason Buffon himself would object to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s description of
his model as a ‘‘sublime but gloomy theory.’’ In the Anthropocene context,
the barely superseded idea of the Holocene as just another interglacial
episode may seem similarly comforting, if for somewhat different reasons.39
Buffon’s paradigm is useful because it offers a clear view of why global warm-
ing is so easy. On the premise that humans and animals ‘‘may be considered
as so many little fires,’’ Buffon goes on to credit agricultural civilization with
the ability to ‘‘fix’’ the surface ‘‘temperature at any point,’’ arguably a form of
geoengineering. Since the earth is cooling internally, it doesn’t matter that ‘‘it
is more difficult for [us] to cool than to heat the earth.’’ For geoengineers
today, of course, this is the whole crux of the problem, as indicated by the
thoroughly problematic hypothesis that sulfate particles could be injected
into the stratosphere to slow global warming.40 Absent the underlying belief
in a cooling trend, the performance of climate change becomes both less
impressive and more inevitable than we find it in Buffon:
Nothing appears more difficult, not to say impossible, than to oppose the successive
cooling of the earth, and to warm the temperature of the climate; yet this feat man
can and has performed. Paris and Quebeck are nearly under the same degree of
latitude; Paris, therefore, would be as cold as Quebeck, if France and the adjacent
countries were as thinly inhabited, and as much covered with wood and water as the
territories in the neighbourhood of Canada.41
Fossil fuels drive the process of global warming, linked for us with the
spike in carbon emissions that began during Buffon’s lifetime and for him
with their quality as a miraculously efficient and inexhaustible source of
heat that might delay the cooling of the earth indefinitely. Because of this
affinity, his paean to coal now has an especially uncanny resonance. Justify-
ing his endorsement of deforestation, Buffon celebrates coal mines as
treasuries that Nature seems to have accumulated in advance for the future needs of
large populations; the more human beings multiply, the more forests diminish:
wood will no longer be enough to satisfy them, they will have recourse to these
immense deposits of combustible matter, the use of which will become that much
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more essential with the increasing refrigeration of the globe; nonetheless, they will
never exhaust them, because a single coal mine contains perhaps as much combus-
tible matter as all the forests of one vast country combined.
Buffon echoes this theme of superabundance in his rhetorically powerful

conclusion to the whole book, which holds out ‘‘treasuries of inexhaustible
fecundity’’ against time’s dark abyss.42 Superabundance of resources is a sci-
entific conviction for Buffon. What is now proved—the imminent reality of
peak oil and the precipitous decline of other all-too-exhaustible resources—
had to be imagined first as a permanent entitlement of fossil plants that
might reconcile human and natural history.43
III
Vast beds of ‘‘vegetable earth,’’ fossil shells, and ‘‘roasted ivory’’

are among the prehuman monuments that make the rock record legible
and bring deep time into view. Buffon’s Epoques both consolidates the analogy
between ‘‘civil and natural history’’ and strains it nearly to its breaking point
by emphasizing the difference in scale. The humanist topos of ‘‘ancient
inscriptions’’ from the earth’s ‘‘archives’’ provides his opening conceit and
authorizes his use of monuments as a major analytic category. But the sharp
discontinuity between premodern nature and modern human nature sur-
faces very quickly in what appears at first to be a conventional discussion of
‘‘savages.’’ Although we may ‘‘form an idea of [man’s] ancient condition’’
from travel in the New World, that ancient state is very modern indeed [encore
bien moderne] compared to the ancient state of the continents and the oceans.
The exaggerated cultural distance between ‘‘savages’’ and moderns, in other
words, vanishes in the face of terrestrial antiquity. ‘‘What revolutions anterior
to the memory of man!’’ Buffon exclaims, and quickly enumerates the natural
‘‘monuments’’ that allow us ‘‘to distinguish four and even five epochs of the
remotest antiquity [dans la plus grande profondeur des temps].’’44
Voyagers and antiquaries concerned with human monuments—apparently
primitive artifacts, whether ancient or modern—also continued to rely on
this analogy between civil and natural history. Like Buffon, however, they
increasingly recognized it as merely heuristic. Recognizing this scalar dis-
continuity made it increasingly difficult, if no less urgent, to situate a narra-
tive of human origins within natural history. Darwin’s pursuit of what he
called the ‘‘mystery of mysteries,’’ the origins of life, was partly inspired by
his encounter with the Yámana and other ‘‘Fuegians’’ on the Beagle, which
highlighted this discontinuity. Darwin may also have recalled the curious
absence of life’s origins from Buffon’s Epochs when he first summarized the
importance of the Galápagos archipelago:

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Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-
streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent,
the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem
to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first
appearance of new beings on this earth.45
Darwin’s description perfectly captures the transition between Buffon’s

third and fourth epochs—a transition that, in Darwin’s view, clearly merited
its own epoch. He cites Buffon only in his discussion of continental mega-
fauna, but Buffon’s influence is indirectly felt as well in Darwin’s many
references to James Cook, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and other voya-
gers and naturalists who preceded him. He followed these predecessors
closely in situating the ‘‘savages’’ of Tierra del Fuego amidst ‘‘primitive
rocks,’’ linking ancestral humanity with geological origins and making the
rocks a medium for the story not just of animal but also of human life.
The examination of material culture in a natural history context, often
linked to hypotheses about the origins of art, may seem less relevant for the
Anthropocene than does Buffon’s climatological paradigm. This naturalis-
tic preoccupation with human artifacts does, however, illuminate the
human dimension of deep time, the anthropomorphized perception of
otherness that cuts across scalar discontinuity. The voyagers’ habit of com-
paring ‘‘primitive’’ with ancient peoples and artifacts established an archae-
ological pattern of using artifacts as evidence for speculation about the early
history of the species. One of Cook’s naturalists, John Reinhold Forster,
scrutinized the material culture of the so-called Fuegians—the Yámana and
other peoples of the tip of South America—to verify their status as ‘‘the most
wretched savages.’’ Darwin’s Beagle texts, too, express revulsion toward these
people, but he himself later attributes these feelings to an unconscious
recognition of them as ‘‘ancestors.’’ The deeply felt difference between the
voyager and the savage vanishes, as it did for Buffon, in the face of geological
time. Darwin recalls this vertiginous temporal rush forty years later in The
Descent of Man: ‘‘The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of
Fuegians on a wild, broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the
reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors.’’46
Early art historians, reciprocally influenced by Forster’s and many other
voyage narratives, found in primitive artifacts a materialization of human
origins as they needed to be situated in the context of geologically based
models such as Buffon’s and those of his increasingly sophisticated succes-
sors. The discontinuity between more and less ‘‘remote’’ antiquity prompted
many variations on the topos of inscription, which may be usefully extended
from Fuseli’s Artist in Despair to the signature mastodon teeth in Buffon. The
neoclassical example of Pierre-François Hugues, also known as Baron
d’Hancarville, is especially germane because he collaborated for many years
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with a pioneer in the geological arena of deep time who is still recognized by
geologists today, the collector of vases and volcanoes, Sir William Hamilton.
These objects in two 1766 engravings (figs. 2–3), designed by d’Hancarville
for his Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the
Hon. William Hamilton, evoke the deep human, or medial, past—in this case
the origins of art—in material form, as for Buffon fossil shells evoked the
origins of life and ‘‘thunder-stones’’ evoked the origins of technology. Simi-
larly, in Forster’s more favorable depiction of Oceanic cultures, Pacific arti-
facts represented relics of the ‘‘ancient systems’’ of arts and manufactures
established in these tropical islands, ‘‘originally the seat of the human race.’’47
Unlike Fuseli’s drawing, which fixates on Roman remains, d’Hancarville’s
designs incorporate many streams of primitive art in a form of aesthetic
polygenesis. The deceptively neoclassical and connoisseurial title of the work
should not obscure its prehistoric ambitions. As d’Hancarville himself put
it, writing in characteristically undiplomatic fashion to his former patron,
‘‘I have written a very good book under the pretext of writing a catalogue.’’
He further refers to his book as a ‘‘metaphysics of art,’’ but his pursuit of first
principles, like Buffon’s, proceeds empirically in terms of monuments. For
Fuseli, who famously declared that ‘‘the Greeks were Gods,’’ the Anthropo-
cene would have to begin with Greek monuments. D’Hancarville signals his
willingness to look elsewhere for antecedent inscriptions by including Egyp-
tian and nonclassical artifacts, one of which has since been identified as
a genuinely prehistoric Italic askos (fig. 2, left foreground).48
D’Hancarville points out the formal allusions to natural materials in
many of these artifacts, allusions that he describes as ‘‘conserving’’ the pre-
history of their fabrication. So the smaller jug in the left foreground of figure 3
preserves the form of the ostrich egg from which such vessels were originally
fashioned, while the cow horn in the foreground of figure 2 recalls the nat-
ural history of the drinking horn. The statue in figure 2 with Greek characters
engraved on its left leg shows the fourth stage of the emergence of sculpture,
preceded by the more ‘‘primitive’’ Egyptian statue without articulated limbs
in figure 3, the ‘‘term’’ or column showing only the head and feet, and finally
the standing stone or ‘‘symbolic column’’ evoked by the horizontal log. The
log also alludes to the origin of architecture, which originally deployed cut
logs before stone columns were devised in the same form, a transformation
signaled by the far end of this column with its carved necking.
These proto-evolutionary studies of material culture by both voyagers
and art historians, extending beyond art to sexuality and religion, initiated
the pursuit of a deeper human past that seems to intensify as the future of
the species becomes more uncertain. More recently, the anthropologist
Kathryn Coe has relocated the origins of art through her evolutionary
account of deformed skulls and engraved teeth from the Paleolithic, while

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figure 2. Unsigned engraving in Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities
from the Cabinet of Sir William Hamilton (Naples, 1766–1776), 1:112
(chap. 3 headpiece [English text]). Courtesy of Margaret M. Bridwell
Art Library, University of Louisville.
conversely Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan have promoted the

systems-biology view that ecological and developmental time scales should
be considered together with the evolutionary one.49 For Coe, the arts
evolved as a technique for promoting kin recognition; for d’Hancarville,
whose art history at times deviated into pornography, the origins of art were
bound up with early fertility cults and other forms of ritual. The recovery of
ancient erotica by way of Pompeii and Herculaneum was an important
inspiration to d’Hancarville and other Enlightenment freethinkers who
began to explore human antiquity outside the aesthetic framework of neo-
classicism. In the idiom of Anthropocene popular science, the strange rudi-
ments of ancient sexuality inscribe themselves in the domestic sphere as
marital infidelity, rehabilitated as an evolutionary necessity in Sex at Dawn:
How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (2011).
‘‘There’s no denying we’re a species with a sweet tooth for sex,’’ according to
the authors, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, who argue that the dawn
of the Holocene was also the time when short-sighted enforcers began to bar
up the candy store. In d’Hancarville’s more antiquarian idiom, ancient art
stands witness to the power of fertility cults and motivates a utopian nostal-
gia for the pre-Christian fusion of religion and sexuality.50
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figure 3. Unsigned engraving in Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities
from the Cabinet of Sir William Hamilton (Naples, 1766–1776), 1:113
(chap. 3 headpiece [French text]). Courtesy of Margaret M. Bridwell Art
Library, University of Louisville.
These natural histories of material culture may seem peripheral to the

set of issues surrounding the geological time scale. The past of art, religion,
and sexuality is ‘‘deep’’ only by analogy, and the agencies behind strati-
graphic, genetic, and archaeological traces must be rigorously distinguished
for each set to function as evidence. My point in this section is simply that
the ‘‘primitive’’ designates a point of expansion in the time scale: although
Buffon is the only one among this group of thinkers who is primarily con-
cerned with geological time, he draws on the same body of antiquarian
source material as d’Hancarville and uses the same idiom of conjectural
history to locate the deep human past. Since the early twentieth century,
radiometric dating has created stronger demarcations among these bodies
of evidence and their disciplines. Deep time itself, however, retains a cogni-
tive and affective form determined by the accumulation of emotional
response to ‘‘primitive’’ peoples so frequently associated with natural history
through the eighteenth century to Darwin’s shock of recognition and
beyond. By humanizing inhuman time, science can operate comparatively
and on different scales. Buffon’s deliberately geological time scale, though
empirically unsound, remains foundational in the sense that it enabled
a differentiation of human and prehuman time scales and reflection on

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their differences. This intellectual legacy helps to explain why humanists are
so intrigued by the Anthropocene, and its antiquarian dimension antici-
pates some of this epoch’s cultural symptoms. The idyll of free love is one
of several nostalgic longings that link the Enlightenment’s ‘‘natural history
of man’’ to our own.
IV
In Fuseli’s The Artist in Despair (fig. 1), the neoclassical artist’s

nostalgia for the ancients becomes a disabling fixation on the colossal power
of inscription—of making marks and leaving footprints. With apologies to
Fuseli, the pastiche shown in figure 4 is intended to illustrate evolutionary
nostalgia as a cognate, if postclassical, symptom of the Anthropocene. The
Vibram website advertising the shoe depicted here claims that ‘‘the benefits
of running barefoot have long been supported by scientific research. . . . No
footwear comes closer to recreating this natural sensation than Vibram
FiveFingers.’’51 The ad draws implicitly on the large scientific and popular
literature on running, and specifically on barefoot (or quasi-barefoot) run-
ning, as an evolved human behavior—in the pages of Runner’s World, in
scientific journals, and in books such as Bernd Heinrich’s Why We Run:
A Natural History. The recent spate of paleo diets, caveman diets, and the
like may have less scientific support, though serious works of deep history,
such as Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain, are helping to popularize
archaeological and anthropological research on diet and other practices
of early human and hominid groups. The barefoot shoe on the ancient
sculpted foot stands for the manner in which the Anthropocene invests the
human/natural time interface problem: evolutionary nostalgia in its current
form is a pastiche that conflates different temporalities and scales, arresting
human evolution at an indeterminate point during the Pleistocene. The
problem of reconciling temporal scales, a well-worn problem in theory, here
meets with a new approach corresponding to the new predicament of climate
change.
Nonetheless, it will be useful to consider how the Anthropocene
remains an Enlightenment project, building on the fantasy of a legible earth
history—a reading of ‘‘the secrets of the earth’s deep heart,’’ as Shelley put it
in Prometheus Unbound, or a luminous ray ‘‘penetrating the abyss of the
remote past,’’ as T. H. Huxley wrote in his great lecture ‘‘On a Piece of
Chalk.’’ Whereas Anthropocene stratigraphy seeks to secure a deep human
future by means of permanent inscriptions—human impressions in the rock
record (such as the ‘‘reef gap’’) that remain legible in the geological
future—evolutionary nostalgia proposes a deep human past so legible that
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figure 4. The Artist Moved to
Awe and Wonder by the Felt
Antiquity of Fivefingers and Skele-
toes, digital image by Suzanne
C. Hackel in consultation with
the author.
it displaces more transient cultural inscriptions. So the ‘‘caveman diet,’’ as

popularly understood, emphasizes meat and elides the history of agriculture
with its grains and other anodyne cultivars produced in ignorance of human
digestive adaptations. It also elides factory farming, which makes eating
meat in the Anthropocene less sustainable than it was for ancestral
hunter-gatherers—not to mention that, as Marlene Zuk points out, the
ancestral gut has been modified many times over. (It is worth remembering
here that ‘‘transforming the vegetable into the animal, and both into our
own substance’’ is one of the signature achievements of the seventh epoch
for Buffon.) Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side—this movement’s
answer to Sex at Dawn—offers a more sophisticated account of both the
science and aesthetics of paleo diets, focusing on greens and other plants
still available in their precultivated forms.52
Superimposing the Anthropocene barefoot shoe over Fuseli’s colossal
ancient foot captures something like the substitution of nature for history so
memorably anatomized in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. As Barthes says of
plastic, ‘‘The hierarchy of substances [or shoes] is abolished: a single one
replaces them all.’’ Just as plastic signifies ‘‘artificial Matter,’’ so too the toe
shoe usurps the role of the foot it envelops.53 Fuseli’s foot is, of course,
a capriccio, an altered drawing loosely documenting marble limbs derived

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from a political representation, an apotheosis of the Emperor Constantine.
Deliberately refusing to ‘‘restore’’ and even omitting major portions of his
original, the Colossus of Constantine, Fuseli monumentalizes the foot and
the pointing hand. I argued earlier that these fragments allude to a lost
ancient capacity, now sublimely unattainable, for inscription in its broad
Anthropocene sense of leaving marks on a huge scale. This kind of monu-
mentality serves many temporalizing projects, including Buffon’s, aimed at
recalibrating human time with deep time. The barefoot shoe, however,
erases marks in at least two significant ways. It purports to correct, anatom-
ically, the deformations of the foot brought on by the unnatural activities of
walking (or running) on pavement and striking hard with the heel, as
encouraged by the conventional padded sole. Rather than simply remem-
bering the ancients, Anthropocene consumer culture strives to forget
modernity, erasing the imprint of industrialization as registered on the land
and on the body itself as medium. In this second, allegorical gesture of
erasure, the barefoot shoe makes a nostalgic but ultimately cynical appeal
(given its means of production) to the smaller carbon footprint of Holocene
and/or preindustrial times. In Barthes’s spirit, then, we might interpret the
Vibram advertisement as an ideological distortion of ecological arguments
that aim at reversing Anthropocene trends and restoring greater stability to
the earth, oceans, and atmosphere.
If we are still early Holocene humans after all, as many of us now seem
inclined to believe, then it seems marginally more likely that ‘‘we’’ will still be
here five million years from now to appreciate the reef gap in the fossil
record. Deferring catastrophe is half the battle, as Dimock suggests in her
riposte to McGurl: ‘‘We are to be forgiven for not bowing too readily to that
fated event [heat death of the sun] 4.5 thousand million years from now, for
not thinking about it every minute of the day.’’ To be fair, this is not exactly
what McGurl is prescribing. In his view, ‘‘reclaiming the term deep time’’ in its
‘‘original geological meaning’’ simply means attending to literary works,
even humble works of genre fiction, that rise to the ‘‘representational chal-
lenge’’ by thematizing deep time in this prehuman sense, specifically by
embodying or metonymizing deep time qua alterity, as (in this reading)
Lovecraft’s stories do. McGurl, in his response, is certainly too quick to
dismiss Dimock’s proffered examples of passages on the infinite from the
poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Even if these were merely
echoes of the Kantian mathematical sublime, which they are not, there is
nothing intrinsically ‘‘affirming’’ or uplifting about the sublime, and more-
over—as Buffon’s expansive epochs illustrate so vividly—the concept of
geological time itself is unthinkable without it.54
The five-million-year period needed to appreciate the reef gap offers
us deep time on a more human scale, which is one function of the
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Anthropocene. It is tempting to say that we are roughly at the halfway mark,
since human stock diverged from the chimpanzee some 4.5 million years
ago, a number that coincidentally echoes McGurl’s and Dimock’s estimate
of 4.5 billion years from now for the heat death of the sun—which would
place our planetary system, now estimated to be 4.6 billion years old, at the
halfway point in its life cycle. For Buffon, too, precisely half the planet’s life
remains: ‘‘We ought to consider . . . that seventy-two thousand years were
necessary to cool [the globe] to a proper temperature, and that an equal
portion of time must elapse before it is so cold as to be unfit for the nour-
ishment of animals and vegetables.’’55 Thinking about scale historically here
suggests a recurring pattern, which may be independent of scale itself. The
encounter with deep time repeatedly generates this halfway mark as a point
of orientation, but also as a sign of ambivalence. Dimock and McGurl’s
debate over whether it is more ethical to think about being or to think about
nothingness recalls the difference between Shelley’s reading of Buffon’s
theory as ‘‘sublime but gloomy’’ and Buffon’s own insistence that the
remaining half of the planet’s life ought to be celebrated as a new golden
age of human reason and natural superabundance.
But Buffon is no Pangloss, and his view does not fit neatly into this
antinomy of optimistic and pessimistic views of the deep future, which today
we might imagine as the end of the Anthropocene. He, too, ends his dis-
cussion on an ethical note, recognizing that the benevolent reign of science
cannot be achieved without lasting peace. Buffon’s surprising critique of
colonialism in the closing section of his Epoques evokes some of the hopes
and fears expressed in the scientific debate on the Anthropocene. The
‘‘perfection’’ of nature, ‘‘seconded’’ by human power, can only be achieved
if colonialism is abandoned: ‘‘Nature required six hundred centuries to
construct her great works. . . . How many ages would men require before
they ceased to disturb and destroy each other? When will they learn, that
the peaceable possession of their own country is sufficient for their happi-
ness?’’ Though Buffon is rightly charged, by Bewell among other scholars,
with using natural history as an alibi for Eurocentrism, he deserves some
credit for drawing these geopolitical inferences without resorting to the
topos of the noble savage. In the same passage, which immediately follows
his denigration of ‘‘savages’’ for ‘‘giv[ing] no support to the earth,’’ Buffon
reflects that the imperial powers (Britain and Spain more notably than
France, it seems) are themselves hardly better than the ‘‘barbarians’’ whose
invasions perennially destroy civilizations, and are thus implicated in his
conclusion that ‘‘the savage state . . . is not the most despicable condition
of mankind.’’56 The Western power of resource extraction, even for Buffon,
does not justify a colonial project that threatens species sustainability
through its violence.

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In our time, the end of the Anthropocene may be calibrated with the
help of a widely cited diagram of ‘‘planetary boundaries’’ compiled by Johan
Rockström and his collaborators. This diagram articulates climate change
with nine other planetary boundaries that can be used to quantify the envi-
ronmental changes warranting the designation of our new geological
epoch. Of these ten boundaries, the nitrogen cycle and especially the rate
of biodiversity loss have already exceeded the threshold of the Holocene by
an even wider margin than climate change itself. Steffen and his co-authors,
who reproduce this table, point out that ‘‘the planetary boundaries
approach is . . . explicitly based on returning the Earth system to the Holo-
cene domain, the environmental envelope within which contemporary civ-
ilization has developed and thrived.’’57 The appeal to the Holocene here
operates in a different register from the marketing of barefoot shoes and
paleo diets. Colonialism, though not a measurable boundary in the same
sense, is certainly still in excess of Holocene levels. Buffon’s politicized
natural history had only a limited influence on his royal employer, but
Rockström and his associates are a powerful policy presence who have
recently seen their planetary boundaries concept endorsed by the United
Nations.
It is neither reassuring nor annihilating to recognize the Anthropocene
as part of an intellectual tradition of writing ourselves into the rock record.
The history of scale, and the history of deep or geological time in particular,
provide useful points of orientation in the Anthropocene because, unlike
other epochs, it is not natural. More precisely, as Johannes Fabian argued so
compellingly thirty years ago, ‘‘natural’’ time originates not only in the
history of nonhuman nature, but also in its projection onto human others.
This entanglement of deep and human time, and the history of Enlighten-
ment science more broadly, enable some critical distance vis-à-vis the
Anthropocene formulation of an apparently unprecedented human/natural
time interface. Our understanding of geological time is no more settled or
absolute (or ‘‘ancestral,’’ in Quentin Meillassoux’s vocabulary) than our
understanding of ‘‘the evolved human brain’’ so often invoked even in
humanistic studies as a fait accompli that can ground quasi-empirical claims
about affect and cognition.58 The brain, considered as a living fossil, presents
human origins in material form, as flint axes did for Buffon and ancient vases
for d’Hancarville. Smail’s title, On Deep History and the Brain, drives home
his point that the brain is a deeper source of inscription than any artifact or
archive, and deserves at least equal opportunity as (pre)historical source
material. If we consider ourselves as geological agents, then inscription
becomes unmoored from writing in yet a deeper sense.
It is instructive to turn from these cosmic matters of scale to a recent
scholarly treatment of scale in the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
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Yoon Sun Lee uses scale to restage the familiar contrast between Austen’s
domesticity and Scott’s historicity. True geopolitical change, Lee argues,
happens on Austen’s scale of ‘‘a little bit of ivory,’’ for Austen’s microscale
frees her conception of transnational capitalism from the trammels of
romantic historicism and its scale of world systems.59 Lee’s conclusion
resembles Dimock’s insistence on ‘‘nonrecursiveness across scales’’ in her
reply to McGurl: the outcome of a larger-scale process does not predeter-
mine the unfolding of smaller-scale processes. Whitney Autin and John
Holbrook use the same logic in their technical critique of the Anthropocene
as stratigraphers, arguing that ‘‘a boundary as broad as a few thousand years
resolves most problems in deep-time stratigraphy but would be of little use
to identify a boundary intended to separate events of recent centuries.’’
Smail and Shryock’s critique of the Anthropocene, however, is of a different
nature. The notion of a ‘‘monstrous leap in the scale at which things hap-
pen’’ must be situated in a fractal pattern of similar leaps: ‘‘Modernity is
a fractal pattern made visible by scalar play.’’60 This recursive moment
returns us to the curious affinity between Buffon’s Enlightenment geochro-
nology and our Anthropocene cultural moment, which both confront
unsynchronized scales of geology and species. The Anthropocene offers
us a framework for confronting the carbon signature of the human species,
but it also puts us in dialogue with the archaeological and geological signa-
tures of ancestral species and geological processes themselves. However
uncomfortably, the Anthropocene situates the history of the species in deep
time, and in that respect it takes up a challenge much older than the
Enlightenment and modernity.
Notes
I would like to thank Tobias Boes, Kate Marshall, and members of the ACLA
seminar ‘‘Writing the Anthropocene’’ (2013); Phillip Stillman and Stefan
Waldschmidt, organizers of ‘‘The Novel and the Anthropocene’’ (October
2013, Duke University); Adam Sneed, who organized ‘‘Economies of Scale’’
(March 2014, University of Michigan); the audiences at these events; and espe-
cially Carsten Strathausen for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’’ Critical Inquiry 35,
no. 2 (2009): 211, 206, 208.
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of
Geological Time (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 2, 48–49; Charles Darwin, The Annotated
Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of ‘‘On the Origin of Species,’’ ed. James T. Costa
(Cambridge, MA, 2009), 310. Darwin here quotes Charles Lyell, and geology
textbooks today trace ‘‘deep time’’ back to Lyell’s immediate source, James
Hutton, whose Theory of the Earth appeared in 1788. For a standard textbook
treatment of the issue, see Putnam’s Geology, 4th ed., ed. Edwin E. Larson and

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Peter W. Birkeland (New York, 1982), 4–5, 249 (cf. the second sentence of the
Wikipedia entry for ‘‘deep time,’’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time, last
modified 17 October 2014).
3. Siegfried Zielinski specifically names Hutton’s Theory of the Earth. Mark McGurl
alludes to early geology indirectly by way of John McPhee, while focusing pri-
marily on the way deep time is thematized in twentieth-century fiction. See his
‘‘The Posthuman Comedy,’’ Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 538n9.
McGurl’s theoretical framework incorporates a critique of Wai Chee Dimock’s
influential Through Other Continents: American Literature Through Deep Time (Prince-
ton, 2006), which disregards traditional geological usage of the term ‘‘deep time’’
(one of the points at issue in a subsequent debate between the two in Critical
Inquiry 39, no. 3 [Spring 2013]: 614–38). Zielinski uses geology to set the stage for
his ‘‘archaeology of the media’’ in Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of
Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA,
2006), esp. 3–7. The Oxford English Dictionary traces ‘‘deep time’’ all the way back
to an 1832 essay by Thomas Carlyle; OED Online, 3rd ed. s.v. ‘‘deep time,’’ http://
www.oed.com/view/Entry/264316?redirectedFrom¼deepþtime.
4. On this point, see my ‘‘Deep Time in the South Pacific: Scientific Voyaging and
the Ancient/Primitive Analogy,’’ in Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed.
Joel Faflak and Joshua Lambier (Toronto, 2015), chap. 4. Here I am focusing
specifically on the way this concern with the primitive is shared between deep
time and the Anthropocene. Hutton famously denied the existence of ‘‘prim-
itive rocks,’’ a category that nonetheless continued to be widely used by geolo-
gists well into the nineteenth century. Hutton brought about the scale shift with
which he is justly credited by insisting that even the most ancient rocks in this
steady-state earth are made up of the formerly molten detritus of still more
ancient rocks. These rocks, then, merely illustrate for us primitive processes of
fusion and reconsolidation operating in the inconceivably distant past, on a dif-
ferent order of magnitude from those visibly operating in the historical present.
See James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795; reprint, Weinheim, 1959), 1:311–12.
5. There is already a substantial literature across the sciences, humanities, and
social sciences, as well as in popular science. Two dedicated journals have been
founded to date: Anthropocene (from Elsevier, 2013–) and Anthropocene Review
(from Sage, 2014–). The best introduction for the general scholarly reader is
the special issue ‘‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?,’’ ed.
Mark Williams et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [Series
A] 369, no. 1938 (March 2011). Relevant approaches in the humanities include
Chakrabarty’s ‘‘The Climate of History’’; Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall, eds.,
‘‘Writing the Anthropocene,’’ special issue, Minnesota Review 83 (2014); and
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA,
2011), 12–13.
6. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2008), 72.
7. Footprints and other imprints are not inscriptions, but they can be ‘‘read’’ by
experienced trackers, and geologists continue to exploit the suppressed meta-
phoricity of the ‘‘rock record’’ and ‘‘fossil record’’ in various ways. William Smith’s
figure of fossils as letters or ‘‘characters on which all must agree’’ is typical for the
nineteenth century. See his Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (London, 1816), 1.
If we are now geological agents, then too hard a distinction between our plan-
etary ‘‘writing’’ and that of prehuman geological agencies would undercut Chak-
rabarty’s influential thesis of an epochal ‘‘collapse of the age-old distinction
between natural history and human history’’ (‘‘Climate,’’ 201).
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8. See, among others, Paul Crutzen, ‘‘Geology of Mankind,’’ Nature 415 (2002): 23.
Like most things about the Anthropocene, this chronological point is far from
settled.
9. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Epochs of Nature (1778), in Natural
History, General and Particular, trans. William Smellie, 2nd ed. (London, 1785),
9:306.
10. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (1965; reprint,
Chicago, 1982), 149.
11. See, respectively, Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural
History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, 2nd ed. (London, 1845),
220, and Charles Darwin, ‘‘On the Distribution of the Erratic Boulders . . . of
South America,’’ Transactions of the Geological Society, series 2, 6 (1842): 417.
I derive the term ‘‘temporalizing’’ from Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:
How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), esp. 7–8, 25–28, 74–75. See
also Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World,
ed. Michael Dettelbach, Harriet Guest, and Nicholas Thomas (Honolulu,
1996), 422n9.
12. John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York, 1998), 50. If science fiction,
as McGurl and Dimock seem to agree, warrants notice for its thematic
approaches to deep time, so too does the ‘‘middle epic’’ of popular science
writing. In science fiction, with its orientation toward the future, the time scale
tends to remain human, although H. P. Lovecraft, as McGurl demonstrates,
constitutes a notable exception.
13. Whitney T. Autin and John M. Holbrook insist on the difference in scale that
limits any contact zone between geological and historical time in ‘‘Is the
Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?,’’ GSA Today 22, no. 7
(July 2012): 60–61.
14. Walter Jackson Bate used this drawing on the cover of The Burden of the Past and the
English Poet (Cambridge, MA, 1970), and Timothy Webb is among the later critics
who cemented this association; see Webb’s ‘‘Romantic Hellenism,’’ Cambridge
Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge, 1993), 152–53.
Important art-historical treatments include Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The
Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton, 2000), 28–39, and Martin Myrone,
Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (London, 2006), 55.
15. Fuseli appropriates an ‘‘emotion . . . generally applied at this time to the more
monumental antiques,’’ in Peter Tomory’s words, though he is also borrowing
the tendency to exaggerate scale from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and possibly
even (as Myrone suggests) from a seventeenth-century prototype. See Peter
Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (New York, 1972), 49, and Myrone,
Gothic Nightmares, 55.
16. Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.49–50, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd ed.,
ed. David Bevington (Chicago, 1980), 1501. It might be argued that scale is
irrelevant to a figure that is literally ‘‘without bottom’’ (the sense of the Greek
root of ‘‘abyss,’’ a word that Shakespeare might have encountered in the Vul-
gate Bible, where it occurs many times in its Latin form).
17. I am using the readily accessible second French edition, Les Epoques de la Nature,
par Monsieur le Comte de Buffon, 2 vols. (Paris, 1780), 1:121, http://books.google.
com/books?id¼d4sNAAAAQAAJ&dq¼les%20epoques%20de%20la%20nature&
pg¼PP9#v¼onepage&q¼les%20epoques%20de%20la%20nature&f¼false. This
particular edition is cited throughout using the short title Epoques, to distinguish
it from Jacques Roger’s modern edition (also cited in a few instances). On the

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‘‘antiquities of the earth,’’ see (among others) William Smith, Stratigraphical Sys-
tem of Organized Fossils (London, 1816), ix–x.
18. Buffon, Epoques, 1:1; Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth
and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago,
1984). Claude Albritton’s The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth’s
Antiquity After the Sixteenth Century (San Francisco, 1980), covers some of the
same territory. The French archaeologist Laurent Olivier adopted the same
expression, le sombre abıˆme du temps, for his recent study of archaeological time,
available in English as The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (Lanham,
MD, 2011).
19. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 13–48;
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1972), 275. In Foucault’s ver-
sion, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck ‘‘introduced a radical discontinuity into the Clas-
sical scale of beings,’’ and this ‘‘discontinuity of living forms made it possible to
conceive of a great temporal current’’ or ‘‘‘history’ of nature.’’ If the ‘‘historicity
proper to life itself’’ is modeled on human history, then temporal distinction
becomes specific to the short (human) time scale and is not, or not yet, ‘‘trans-
scalar,’’ to adapt Nixon’s term. Foucault’s account effaces the continuity
between natural history and biology as well as the situation of human agency
relative to geological time as we find it in Buffon.
20. Our signature emission of CO2—ironically a ‘‘colourless, odourless gas,’’ as
Steffen and co-authors point out—took many thousands of years, on most
accounts, to begin making a mark that now appears permanent and significant
on the planetary ‘‘scale of the Earth as a . . . system.’’ See Will Steffen et al., ‘‘The
Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,’’ Philosophical Transac-
tions of the Royal Society of London [Series A] 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 842–43.
Additional media to consider here might include stalagmites and even tree
rings. Nonetheless, ratification of the Anthropocene in 2016 may not be a fore-
gone conclusion. For one dissenting view, see Autin and Holbrook, ‘‘Is the
Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy?’’ (followed by Jan Zalasiewicz’s reply
in the same issue of GSA Today [July 2012]).
21. Mark McGurl, ‘‘‘Neither Indeed Could I Forebear Smiling at Myself’: A Reply to
Wai Chee Dimock,’’ Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 638. ‘‘Disadvantage’’
seems to be intended more in an ethical than a quantitative sense. The evolu-
tionary time scale mooted by Dimock in this exchange seems to me less reliably
‘‘nonrecursive’’ than ‘‘that [other] longue durée’’ of geology. See her ‘‘Low Epic,’’
Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 616, 627.
22. See, respectively, Steffen et al., ‘‘The Anthropocene,’’ 860–61; Eric Swynge-
douw, ‘‘Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate
Change,’’ Theory, Culture, and Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 213–32; and Crispin
Tickell, ‘‘Societal Responses to the Anthropocene,’’ Philosophical Transactions
[Series A] 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 926–32.
23. Steffen et al., ‘‘The Anthropocene,’’ 843–44; Nixon, Slow Violence 216. The
decision by Steffen et al. and other contributors to ‘‘The Anthropocene’’ to
underemphasize the range and persistence of alternative models, chiefly mod-
els that put the start of the Anthropocene much earlier, may be strategic. For
a stronger sense of the range of possibilities and the debate surrounding them,
see Christopher E. Doughty et al., ‘‘The Legacy of the Pleistocene Megafauna
Extinctions,’’ Nature Geoscience 6 (2013): 761–64, and the exhibit ‘‘Recording
the Anthropocene’’ at Duke University Libraries, http://exhibits.library.duke.
edu/exhibits/show/anthropocene, with its overview of four ‘‘origin stories.’’
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24. On early industrial air, see Tobias Menely, ‘‘‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper’s
Task and the Time of Climate Change,’’ PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 484–85.
25. Buffon, Epoques, 1:7. Here I depart from William Smellie’s often useful, though
somewhat abridged translation, ‘‘Facts and Arguments in Support of the Count
de Buffon’s Epochs of Nature,’’ in Natural History, General and Particular, trans.
William Smellie, 9:258–410. The relevant French is ‘‘nous tâcherons de former
une chaı̂ne qui, du sommet de l’échelle du tems, descendra jusqu’à nous.’’
The abstract or table of epochs is given in Smellie’s version (Natural History, 9:
305–6).
26. Rossi traces the ‘‘abyss of time’’ motif back considerably further than Buffon, to
the late seventeenth century. He attributes the well-worn phrase ‘‘le sombre
abı̂me du temps,’’ used by Rossi’s translator for the English title of his book, to
Buffon himself (Dark Abyss of Time, 108–9), but Buffon’s recurring and tren-
chant use of the expression still used by French geologists discussing the time
scale, l’échelle du temps, seems to me equally striking and better documented.
27. Buffon, Epoques, 1:176, 186–87, 220.
28. Buffon, Epoques, 2:83–84; Rossi, Dark Abyss, 108. Rossi groups Buffon with a small
radical coterie, including Denis Diderot, Thomas Wright, and Immanuel Kant,
who were willing to contemplate a time scale in the millions of years as early as
the mid-eighteenth century (109–12). In one of the manuscripts of the Epoques,
Buffon claims that he has formed his latest chronology ‘‘on a scale forty times
larger’’ than that appearing in print, but realizes that his contemporaries are
not ready for such a radical revision. In his discussion of this passage, Jacques
Roger also uses the phrase ‘‘sombre abı̂me,’’ but without attribution. See
Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Les Epoques de la Nature, ed. Jacques Roger,
in Mémoires du Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, ser. C 10 (1962): lxvi–ii.
Strictly speaking, there are only six days of Creation; Epoch Seventh was,
according to Roger, an afterthought, though of course the appearance of an
ironic riposte to Genesis is merely coincidental (xxxv).
29. Buffon, Epoques, 2:157–58; Natural History, 9:380. In another long note (note 9),
Buffon extensively quotes his American correspondence and other recent liter-
ature on mammoth and mastodon finds, including the journal of George Cro-
ghan, who discovered the famous ‘‘Ohio animal’’ in 1765 (Epoques, 1:69–77, cf.
45–48). The main body of illustrations in the Epoques (plates 1–6) comprises six
monumental engravings of fossil teeth, including several specimens from Ohio.
30. Buffon, Natural History, 9:382–84. The strong emphasis on property divisions
and land tenure here shows the influence of conjectural history.
31. That is, it incorporates them with megafauna and continental drift. For Darwin
this deep affiliation was (by The Descent of Man) a matter of course, but for Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and other stadial historians in Buffon’s time, the stages of
society were affiliated with philosophy rather than the empirical study of
nature. In the year that Epoques was first published, Forster complained about
precisely this point in the preface to his Observations, 9–10. From barefoot
running to paleo-anthropological models of the Pleistocene megafauna extinc-
tions, our cultural moment also offers narratives that unsettle the orderly prog-
ress from prehistoric to modern.
32. Buffon, Natural History 9:381, 389–90, 392, 393, emphasis added in the last case.
Inspired by the Antiquities of Flavius Josephus and J.-S. Bailly’s commentary on
Josephus, Buffon dates the first high civilization (in present-day Siberia and
Tartary) between 7000 and 4000 BCE, and places ‘‘three thousand years of
ignorance’’ between this period and recorded history (390).

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33. Ibid., 9:381–83. On Buffon’s antiquarian influences and leanings, see Buffon,
Epoques de la nature (ed. Roger), xxxv, 306n2; and Kenneth L. Taylor, ‘‘The
Epoques de la Nature and Geology During Buffon’s Later Years,’’ Buffon 88: Actes
du Colloque International pour le Bicentenaire de la Mort de Buffon, ed. J. Gayon
(Paris, 1992), 371–85, esp. 377–78.
34. Buffon, Natural History, 9:385. In the absence of carbon dating and DNA anal-
ysis, Buffon’s apparently fanciful deduction of prehistoric astronomy from this
‘‘lunisolar period’’ may be the closest thing available to the kind of quantitative
deep historical evidence that Smail defends. For Smail’s discussion of alterna-
tive (nonarchival) forms of evidence in history, see On Deep History, 59–66; for
his use of DNA studies, see 194. In addition to Bailly’s commentary on Josephus,
the relevant antiquarian literature includes Giambattista Vico’s New Science and
John Whitehurst’s Essay on the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London,
1778), contemporary with the Epoques, which offers a spirited vindication of the
‘‘great antiquity of arts and civilization’’ (272). As Roger comments in his edi-
tion of the Epoques, prehistory would need to wait for Jacques Boucher de
Perthes. The first substantial piece of literary scholarship on deep time takes
up the story at precisely this point, with an incisive analysis of Darwin and
Boucher de Perthes. See André Spears, ‘‘Evolution in Context: ‘Deep Time,’
Archaeology, and the Post-Romantic Paradigm,’’ Comparative Literature 48, no. 4
(1996): 343–58. For a historical account, see A. Bowdoin van Rieper, Men Among
the Mammoths (Chicago, 1993).
35. Buffon, Natural History, 9:399, 400–401.
36. ‘‘Was die Menschen von der Natur lernen wollen, ist, sie anzuwenden, um sie
und die Menschen vollends zu beherrschen.’’ See Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt, 1969), 10 (emphasis added).
The ‘‘recursive moment’’ (das rückläufige Moment) marks Enlightenment’s inex-
orable regression into myth (3).
37. Buffon, Natural History, 9:402, 404–5.
38. Ibid., 9:403, 394; Alan Bewell, ‘‘Jefferson’s Thermometer: Colonial Biogeo-
graphical Constructions of the Climate of America,’’ Romantic Science: The Lit-
erary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany, 2003), 128, 132;
Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and
Present (Berkeley, 2011), 247. For Buffon’s perhaps surprising critique of colo-
nialism see Natural History, 9:394–95.
39. For Percy Shelley’s comment, see his journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock
included in Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France,
Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (London, 1817), 161. Cf. Christopher Coki-
nos’s description of the Holocene as ‘‘this awesome precious interglacial surge’’
in Bodies, of the Holocene (Kirksville, MO, 2013), 14.
40. Steffen et al., ‘‘The Anthropocene,’’ 859. Cf. Erin O’Donnell, ‘‘Buffering the Sun:
David Keith and the Question of Climate Engineering,’’ Harvard Magazine (July–
August 2013), http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/07/buffering-the-sun.
41. Buffon, Natural History, 9:396.
42. Buffon, Epoques, 1:218; 2:210.
43. Cf. William Blake’s proverb, ‘‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.’’ See
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (plate 8, line 16), in The Complete Poetry and Prose
of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York, 1988), 36.
44. Buffon, Natural History, 9:286; Buffon, Epoques, 1:30. These monuments shed
light on most shadowy regions, Buffon claims, where even the light of genius is
baffled.
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45. Darwin, Journal of Researches, 377–78.
46. Forster, Observations, 9–10; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, 1871),
256. On Darwin and Tierra del Fuego, see Anne Mackaye Chapman, European
Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin (Cam-
bridge, 2010), chaps. 4–5, and Cannon Schmitt, Darwin and the Memory of the
Human (Cambridge, 2009), chap. 1.
47. Forster, Observations, 196, 342.
48. See, respectively, d’Hancarville’s letters to Hamilton, included as an appendix
in Pascal Griener, Le Antichità Etrusche, Greche, e Romane 1766–1776 di Pierre
Hugues d’Hancarville (Rome, 1992), 141; Fuseli, quoted in The Autobiography and
Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Malcolm Elwin (London, 1950), 78–79;
and Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, eds., Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton
and His Collection (London, 1996), 234.
49. Kathryn Coe, Ancestress Hypothesis (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003); Kenneth M. Weiss
and Anne V. Buchanan, Mermaid’s Tale (New York, 2009).
50. See, respectively, d’Hancarville’s Monuments of the Secret Cult of the Roman Ladies
(ca. 1780), Gallica bibliothèque numerique, Bibliothèque national de France,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55160418; Siegel, Desire and Excess,
64–72; Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins
of Modern Sexuality (New York, 2010), 3; and Griener, Le Antichità Etrusche, 78.
51. Vibram website, http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/barefoot-sports/barefoot_
running.htm, accessed 11 July 2013. This text has since been taken down. The
image (fig. 4) is not an advertisement by Vibram or any other company but
a pastiche designed by the graphic artist Suzanne Hackel in consultation with
the author.
52. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound 4.1.279, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose,
2nd ed., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York, 2002), 277;
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘‘On a Piece of Chalk,’’ MacMillan’s Magazine 18, no.
107 (1868): 408. Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About
Sex, Diet, and How We Live (New York, 2013), 92–133; Jo Robinson, Eating on the
Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health (New York, 2013). In an interview
on NPR’s Fresh Air (10 July 2013), Robinson, an investigative journalist, stated
that this book is based on a survey of 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles,
NPR, The Salt, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/07/10/195592468/
Eating-On-The-Wild-Side-A-Field-Guide-To-Nutritious-Food.
53. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972), 99, 98.
54. Dimock, ‘‘Low Epic,’’ 615; McGurl, ‘‘Posthuman Comedy,’’ 537–38; McGurl,
‘‘‘Neither Indeed,’’’ 634.
55. Buffon, Natural History, 9:397.
56. Ibid., 9:394–95. In the first quoted sentence, Smellie euphemistically translates
siècles as ‘‘ages’’ rather than ‘‘centuries.’’
57. Steffen et al., ‘‘The Anthropocene,’’ 861, 860.
58. Fabian, Time and the Other; Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London, 2008), 10. The Anthropo-
cene brain, at least, should benefit from the lessons of the Holocene and
continue evolving, an outcome that the current rate of population growth—
another potential candidate for the set of planetary boundaries—may favor.
59. Yoon Sun Lee, ‘‘Austen’s Scale-Making,’’ Studies in Romanticism 52 (Summer
2013): 171n1.
60. Autin and Holbrook, ‘‘Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy,’’ 60; Shryock
and Smail, Deep History, 244–45, 264.

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Deep Time at the

T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E P O S E S A R A D I C A L new answer to an old

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