This chapter interprets the Anthropocene as a stage in the emergence of deep time as a concept in Western culture beginning in the eighteenth century. The literary histories of deep time and the Anthropocene converge in many places. Like theorists of the Anthropocene today, earlier writers on deep time explored the divergence and convergence of human and natural histories while also reflecting on cultural variation in the articulation of these two notionally separate histories. This chapter traces the popular science of deep time through the writings of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), Hugh Miller (1802-1856), and George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), the American geographer who is sometimes regarded as a founder of the Anthropocene concept as well. These writings promote the specialization of the modern geosciences and set them off against “unscientific” long-scale cosmologies. Though it inherits their colonial bias, the Anthropocene frame can facilitate our recovery of these non-Western cosmologies intertwined with the history of deep time. The age of the earth, the newness of our species, and other geological canons of deep time may once again be considered side-by-side with other knowledge and memory practices that bear on these ideas, as they were by early geological thinkers.