The most natural zero point is the Big Bang, looking forward, but the most common is the ever-changing present, looking backward.
The idea of presenting history logarithmically goes back at least to 1932, when John B. Sparks copyrighted his chart "Histomap of Evolution".
[1] Around the same time it was also explored by the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, who used it to propose that memories naturally fade in an exponential manner.
Logarithmic timelines have also been used in futures studies to justify the idea of a technological singularity.
In this table each row is defined in seconds after the Big Bang, with the earliest at the top of the chart.