Antediluvian

Much as the Abrahamic religions, ancient Sumerians divided the world between pre-flood and post-flood eras, the former being a time where the God walked the earth with humans.

[6] The term antediluvian was used in natural science well into the 19th century and lingered in popular imagination despite increasingly detailed stratigraphy mapping the Earth's past, and was often used for the Pleistocene period, where humans existed alongside now extinct megafauna.

Even back in the early 18th century, Plutonists had argued for an ancient Earth, but the full impact of the depth of time involved in the Pre-Adamitic period was not commonly accepted until uniformitarianism as presented in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology of 1830.

[11] While each period was understood to be a vast aeon, the narrative of the pre-Adamitic world was still influenced by the biblical storyline of creation in this transition.

From antiquity, fossils of large animals were often quoted as having lived together with the giants from the Book of Genesis: e.g. the Tannin or "great sea monsters" of Gen 1:21.

[13][14] With the advent of geological mapping in the early 19th century, it became increasingly obvious that many of the fossils associated with the "secondary" (sedimentary) rock were neither those of giant humans nor of any extant animals.

These included large animals such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, pliosaurs and the various giant mammals[clarification needed] found when excavating the Catacombs of Paris.