How weird fossils created by human garbage may baffle future civilisations

How weird fossils created by human garbage may baffle future civilisations

Plastic bottles, smartphones, chicken bones – and the wider debris of everyday life – are tipped to outlast human civilisation and become the defining fossils of our age.

How today’s cheap clothes, wind turbines and plastic bottles will become the fossils of the future

Manufactured objects will form distinctive, if sometimes hard to interpret, clues to human existence, paleontologist authors Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz say.

Plastic bottles, smartphones, chicken bones... The remains of our daily life should survive our civilization and become the iconic fossils of our time. When we think of fossils, we imagine dinosaur bones or ancient shells frozen in stone. But for scientists, our modern waste – from polyester clothes to electronic devices – today write a new chapter in the geological history of the Earth. Frozen and compressed for millennia, these ordinary object…