Most mythologies contain a nearly instantaneous creation of the Earth by one or more gods, followed shortly thereafter by the creation of humankind. The modern evolutionary insight that humankind has existed only briefly in the long history of the Earth is a product of only the last two centuries and is an insight most people even today do not appreciate. The 5,000 years of human history is only one-twentieth of the approximately 100,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed as a species in fully modern form, and only one-millionth of the 4.6 billion years that the Earth has existed. According to science writer John McPhee, if a person stretches out his or her arms to represent the age of the Earth, all of civilization corresponds to a day's growth of fingernail.

The predominant source of Earth history that was available to scholars in the Western world until just a few centuries ago was the Bible. By adding up the genealogies of the Old Testament, Bible scholars calculated that the Earth was about 6,000 years old. Some Bible scholars, early in the age of science, got caught up with a desire for precision, without having any more information from which to work. The most famous example of this is James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and Anglican Primate of All Ireland. He published Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced from the First Origin of the World in 1650, in which he identified 4004 B.C. as the year of creation. Theologian John Lightfoot, about the same time, added that the creation occurred at noon on October 23, 4004 B.C. Earlier scholars had concluded that the Supreme Being's plan for the history of the world fit into precise millennia. This is an assumption shared by many modern people, who expected Earth-shattering events to occur in the year 2000 (called "Y2K" in modern jargon). Ussher knew that King Herod, a Jewish king who ruled Israel under Roman occupation, died in 4 B.C. yet, according to the Bible, was alive when Jesus was born. Therefore, Ussher concluded that the Western calendar is off by four years, and he chose 4004 B.C. rather than 4000 B.C. as the year of creation.

Biblical scholars disagreed as to whether there may have been "pre-Adamite" humans that existed, possibly for long periods of time, before the creation described in the first chapter of Genesis. Even from a study of the Bible, such precision as exhibited by Archbishop Ussher was not accepted by all scholars. Evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould has written more extensively on the topic of how Ussher and other biblical scholars calculated the age of the Earth and its major historical events. If the Earth was only 6,000 years old, then it must be virtually unchanged since the moment of creation, with the exception of the Noachian Deluge (the Flood described in the Old Testament), according to these biblical scholars.

As scientific investigation of the Earth began, many observations did not fit with the concept of a recently created Earth. Most famously, geologist James Hutton observed the sedimentary layers of rock at Siccar Point in Scotland and realized that vast stretches of time were necessary for their formation. Geologist Charles Lyell expanded Hutton's view into a geological model of uniformitarianism in which the Earth was, as far as scientific inquiry could determine, eternal. As Hutton wrote in a 1788 treatise, "The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,--no prospect of an end." . . .

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