The ZIP format cannot handle times before 1980.
Issue6090 provided a nice error message for trying to add such files.

I'm seeing a system for reproducible builds that sets mtime to 1970 (zero UNIX timestamp), resulting in files that Python can't package into (zip-based) wheels.

At least here on Fedora, the `zip` command-line utility silently bumps old timestamps to 1980-01-01. Of course, silently corrupting data would not be good default behavior for Python.
But in many cases timestamps don't matter. It would be nice to give ZipFile and ZipFile.write() a `strict_timestamps=True` keyword argument that could be turned off.