Prophet's fit() method cannot handle dates prior to 1728-01-01

I have a dataset that goes back to 1700 up to the future. The fit() method will raise an exception because pandas cannot handle subtracting the current date from a date < 1728-01-01

OutOfBoundsDatetime: Result is too large for pandas.Timedelta. Convert inputs to datetime.datetime with 'Timestamp.to_pydatetime()' before subtracting.

Prophet method "setup_data()" will automatically convert your "ds" column to panda datetime - regardless of what value you pass in as your "ds" column.

I tried to start doing a conversion, just to see how far I could get to using python's datetime.datetime - instead of pandas time.

The exact line where the exception is thrown is:

self.t_scale = df['ds'].max() - self.start