Big-Boned Chickens May Be Humans' Geologic Legacy

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Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2018

⏱️ 2 minutes

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Summary

Millions of years from now, the geologic record of the "Anthropocene" will be littered with plastics, yes, but also chicken bones. Christopher Intagliata reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.
0:05.0	I'm Christopher Intagiyata.
0:07.0	Hundreds of millions of years from now,
0:09.0	when humans are probably long gone,
0:11.0	what sort of geologic record will we leave behind for future archaeologists?
0:15.9	Plastics?
0:16.9	Sure.
0:17.9	Concrete maybe?
0:18.9	How about...
0:19.9	A tasty tender chicken.
0:20.9	Good chicken.
0:21.9	Oh, chicken. Oh, chicken.
0:24.0	Yeah, chicken.
0:25.0	Humanity consumes some 66 billion birds a year.
0:28.0	That's billion with a bee.
0:30.0	The mass of chickens on the earth is so big it beats the mass of all other birds combined
0:35.2	The numbers are astonishing.
0:37.1	Richard Thomas is an archaeologist at the University of Lester who writes with his colleagues in the
0:41.4	Journal Royal Society Open Science
0:43.4	that chicken bones could be a unique signifier of our era known as the Anthropocene.
0:49.2	Thomas says our chicken industrial complex can be traced back to a program in the late 1940s, known as the
0:55.0	Chicken of Tomorrow program.
	...

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