2023-07-14 20:29:25
If in 500,000 years, an extraterrestrial civilization or our distant descendants search the subsoil of the Earth in search of traces of our past, they are likely to find surprising evidence of the abrupt changes that have taken place in our time: chicken bones.
This is the conclusion reached by scientists who have documented the advent of the Anthropocene – a proposed new geological epoch physically marked by man’s imprint on the planet, whose natural systems were rapidly and radically changed in the last century.
Other traces, perhaps more spectacular in appearance, will bear witness to this rupture: the sudden rise in CO2 or methane, the radioactive fallout from nuclear tests, ubiquitous microplastics or the development of invasive species…
But chicken bones are among the most telling of humanity’s footprint, in more ways than one.
To begin with, it is a human invention… “The meat of modern chicken is unrecognizable compared to that of its ancestors or its wild equivalents”, underlines the geologist Carys Bennett, author of a study on the subject.
“Body size, skeletal shape, bone chemistry, genetics: everything is different,” she notes.
In other words, the modern chicken is proof of man’s ability to alter nature.
Its origins date back to the jungles of Southeast Asia, where the wild rooster (gallus gallus) was domesticated some 8,000 years ago.
The species has long been sought after for its meat and eggs, but its accelerated transformation into the creature that populates supermarkets around the world only began after World War II.
“Evolution usually takes millions of years, but in this case the process took only a few decades to produce a new form of animal,” notes Jan Zalasiewicz, professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester.
This scientist chaired the working group on the Anthropocene, which concluded that this geological epoch had succeeded in the middle of the 20th century to the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The ubiquity of chickens provides another clue to these upheavals: wherever humans are, there are remnants of their favorite source of animal protein.
Today there are some 33 billion of these birds, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The biomass of domesticated chickens weighs more than three times that of all wild bird species combined.
At least 25 million are killed every day to become chicken tikka in Punjab, yakitori in Japan, yassa in Senegal or nuggets in KFCs or other McDonald’s around the world.
Unlike beef or pork, which are forbidden in some religions, chicken is almost universal.
“Chickens are a symbol of how our biosphere has changed and is now dominated by the consumption and use of resources for the benefit of humans”, summarizes Carys Bennett, who left university to join the defense association animal rights PETA.
“The enormous mass of chicken bones discarded around the world will leave a clear trace in future geological analyses,” she concludes.
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