Eternals Full Timeline: Creation, Early Humans, All Interference & Main MCU

Warning: Contains major SPOILERS for Eternals.

Here's how the millennia-spanning events of Eternals fit into the MCU's timeline. The longevity and the near-invincibility of the Eternals are central to their story, as their only mission in life is to fend off the Deviants while Earth evolves over thousands of years. Like the rest of the MCU's movies and TV shows, most of Chloé Zhao's Eternals takes place in the present day. However, the movie features some key moments that change how Marvel fans see the in-universe history of the world.

One of the biggest questions that Eternals answers is why the Eternals stayed away from human affairs for 7000 years but suddenly returned right after the events of Avengers: Endgame. The movie confirmed that Thanos and Hulk's Snaps put the right variables in motion, creating the energy necessary to awaken the Celestial Tiamut from his sleep inside the Earth's core. This catastrophic event was bound to happen sooner or later, as Eternals revealed that the Celestials' method of reproduction has been ingrained in the Earth's development long before humans began to roam its surface.

Such a huge reveal also confirms that the MCU was always fantastical in nature since the Earth's early days, and that the sudden rise of superhero teams in the 2010s is just a small part of billions of years of intricate lore. Since Eternals jumps back and forth in Earth's history, its sequence of events can become confusing. Here's what the timeline of Eternals looks like chronologically and how everything fits into the known history of the MCU.

Billions of Years Ago - The World Forge & The Eternals' Origin

Eternals Cast side by side with the sun rising behind them

One of the most crucial pieces of information — so important to the Celestials that they kept it secret from the Eternals themselves — is that the Eternals aren't really humanoids born on the planet Olympia. Instead, Arishem and the first Celestials used the World Forge to build incredibly advanced robots whose memories are wiped every time they fulfill their mission to prepare a planet for the birth of a new powerful Celestial. Considering that the Eternals can spend several thousands of years encouraging each planet's population to thrive and how many lifetimes the Eternals must have already lived, it's safe to say that the first batch of Eternals was created many billions of years ago.

Millions of Years Ago - Deviants Arrive On The MCU's Earth

Depicted as the corrupted offshoot of the Eternals, the Deviants are the Eternals' natural enemies. Although Eternals opens with the heroes' first contact with humans 7000 years ago, a flashback sequence goes further back to show how the Deviants first touched down long before that. The creatures arrive as meteorite-like fireballs and ravage everything in sight, suggesting that the Deviants were responsible for the extinction of many ancient species, including Earth's dinosaurs.

5000+ B.C. - The Eternals Arrive On Earth

All of the Eternals walk through the desert

The moment where the Eternals first intervene in human affairs comes more than 7000 years prior to the apocalyptic Emergence. Back then, the Eternals show humans their good intentions by saving them from the Deviants, and Sersi begins encouraging them to achieve technological progress when she transforms a stone tool into metal. Eternals reveals that humanity picked up speed with Sersi's introduction of agriculture, accompanied by advancements in architecture, weaponry, and culture, which leads to the rise of the Babylonian Empire.

Here's where Phastos' attempt at introducing the steam engine is quickly shot down by Thena, where the original Ishtar Gate is destroyed by a Deviant, and where Druig first shares his wish to stop following Arishem's orders and help humans evolve faster. It's also the moment where Ikaris and Sersi start falling for each other. Babylon eventually crumbles after the Eternals depart, and the Domo is left to lie among its ruins. Makkari makes herself at home inside the ship, and somewhere along the line, Kingo abandons Sprite after he gets tired of explaining why she never grows up. According to Kingo, he meets Thor when the God of Thunder is still a child, but that means that either Thor used to accompany Odin on his trips to Midgard or Kingo is simply lying.

400 C.E. - Ikaris and Sersi's Wedding

To human eyes, it took Ikaris and Sersi a very long time to tie the knot. Eternals showed the couple celebrating a traditional ceremony at the height of the Gupta Empire in India, 400 C.E. The scene is short and only features all of the Eternals characters together for a few seconds, but the scene's setting also highlights how important they were to various civilizations. The movie doesn't say it explicitly, but the short-lived Gupta Empire was the cradle of myriad advancements in the region, including real-life scientific, cultural, and artistic developments. In the MCU, these are all owed to the Eternals, who were also in their best moment at the time.

1521 C.E. - The Fall of Tenochtitlan

Druig in Eternals During The Fall of Tenochtitlan

The Eternals' first low point as a group goes in tune with one of the world's countless low points. In 1521, the Spaniard conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés lay siege to the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. This is the point where each Eternal reinstates their stance on the future of the planet and the free will of humanity. Druig is shown stopping the conflict with mind control, which suggests that Mexican history is at least slightly different in the MCU due to the outcome of this battle.

1945 C.E. - Hiroshima

Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos in Eternals' Hiroshima Scene

One of the bleakest parts of Eternals comes when Phastos reacts to the destruction of Hiroshima. Although he wasn't directly responsible for the invention of the atomic bomb, he still feels guilty for having provided humans with the technology that was used to create it. This is the earliest scene where Eternals overlaps with any major event shown in the MCU so far: WWII. By the time Phastos laments Hiroshima, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers have already fallen in the ice and Red Skull has already been teleported to Vormir by the Tesseract in Captain America: The First Avenger, thus allowing WWII to end roughly the same way it ended in real life.

Present Day - One Week Before the Emergence

Ajak's surprising death is retroactively explained by Ikaris when he confesses what he had to do to follow Arishem's plans. One week before the Emergence, Ikaris feeds Ajak to Kro and the Deviants, imbuing the creatures with her power. Ajak's description of the Emergence, which she attributes to Thanos and Hulk's Snaps and the resulting spike in energy, places the present-day events of Eternals shortly after the events of Avengers: Endgame, with enough time for the world to settle a little and approach the aftermath of the Blip. This point in the timeline fits producer Nate Moore's confirmation that Eternals overlaps with Spider-Man: Far From Home's ending and the beginning of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Present Day MCU, 2024 - The Emergence

The bulk of Eternals takes place six days after the death of Ajak, which is still simultaneous to Spider-Man: Far From Home. Without counting the movie's flashbacks and exposition sequences, the Eternals' fight against the last Deviants and Ikaris' betrayal are pretty straightforward, and the biggest jumps in time are the Eternals' trips from one country to the next. By this point, Kingo has impersonated many of his ancestors in Bollywood, Druig has watched over "20 generations" in the Amazon, Gilgamesh has taken care of the deteriorating Thena for many years, Makkari has kept busy collecting artifacts for centuries, Phastos has formed a family for a relatively short time, and Sersi and Sprite have lived a fairly normal life in London with Ikaris not too far away from them.

Two Weeks Later - Post Credits Scenes

Black Knight and Starfox aka Eros From The Eternals Post-Credits Scenes

The two post-credits scenes in Eternals take place two weeks after Sersi turned Tiamut into a statue in the middle of the ocean. It's likely that Arishem materialized in front of Earth and seized Sersi, Kingo, and Phastos around the same time that Pip the Troll brought Eros aboard the Domo. With a new grudge against Arishem for kidnapping his girlfriend, Dane Whitman takes out the Ebony Blade soon afterward. Whatever happens next, whether it's Blade, a Black Knight movie, or another brand-new Marvel project, is likely to take place several months or a couple of years after Eternals.

More: Eternals' After-Credits Scenes Introduce 4 Massive MCU Phase 4 Characters