Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientists
As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature. “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression. -“They’re going to be around in the strata for a long time and eventually you would expect little gardens of clay minerals growing in the space where the can was. It’s going to be a distinctive, new kind of fossil,” says the geologist Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a leading proponent of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that reflects the impact of modern humanity on the planet, who with Gabbott has written a book on technofossils, Discarded. Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well known as fossils, but while those of modern broiler chickens are fragile – they are bred to live fast, dying fat and young – the sheer volume will ensure many survive into the geological record. At any moment, there are about 25 billion live chickens in the world, vastly more than the world’s most abundant wild bird, say Gabbott and Zalasiewicz, making them likely to be the most abundant bird in all of Earth’s history. The sudden appearance of vast numbers of a monstrous bird five times bigger than its wild forebear will certainly strike future palaeontologists. Clothes will also make an abrupt entry into humanity’s fossil record. For millennia, clothes were made from natural and easily rotted materials such as cotton, linen and silk. Today, the world’s growing population often wears mass-produced synthetic garments that are rapidly dumped.
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