Archaeologists regularly discover fossilised remains that enable them to speculate on how dinosaurs or ancient civilisations might have lived … but what on earth will the distant future’s scientists make of the way we live?
A new book ‘Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy’ explores exactly that topic, and authors Professor Sarah Gabbott and Professor Jan Zalasiewicz reckon the grey nomad lifestyle may have tomorrow’s palaeontologists scratching their heads!
The book examines how objects like plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, aluminium cans, teabags, mobile phones, and T-shirts buried in soils, seafloor muds and the gigantic middens of our landfill sites may eventually become technofossils.
Today’s kings of the road are tomorrow’s old fossils. PIC Montage: Cizza
Professor Gabbott, a palaeontologist from the UK’s University of Leicester, told the Grey Nomads that how well things fossilise depends on a number of factors.
She says, for example, if a campground – complete with caravans, tents, and cars – was suddenly overwhelmed by a catastrophic event like a volcanic eruption coating the entire site in hot, fine ash à la Pompeii, or a massive mudslide buried everything in thick, wet debris, the geological context would determine whether the remains eventually fossilised.
“If the site lies on a part of Earth’s crust that is rising, it will eventually be worn down by natural forces – wind, rain, sunlight, and frost – eroding the evidence away,” she said. “But if the campground happens to be located in a coastal floodplain, where the land is subsiding, the prospects for fossilisation improve dramatically.”
The composition of the buried material is also important.
“Different materials follow different paths—some toward decay, others toward preservation and, possibly, immortality as technofossils,” she said. “However, as most caravans are made of plastic and metals their chances of fossilisation will be very good indeed.”
Professor Gabbott and Professor Zalasiewicz say the various, random fossilised remains of things people now travel around with will no doubt puzzle those who follow us.
“What might some far-future palaeontologists make of petrified fragments of guitars, of CDs, of kettles, of books,” Prof Gabbott said. “The enormous diversity of our manufactured objects will be a challenge in itself … but, we think that the fossil remains of caravans, even if fragmentary, may well be interpreted as complex dwelling places for the species that used them.”
She says future investigators will probably work out that these were carefully constructed habitats, from the remains of their roofs, walls and floors. Perhaps, even, that they were designed to be mobile, because the corroded and remineralised remains of tyre wheels time – complete with traces of rubber and perhaps even with some connections to axles, ball-bearings and so on – may well survive on the corners of such extraordinarily fossilised constructions.
“They may wonder, then, why certain of the species lived a nomadic lifestyle, free to roam, whereas others lived in fixed dwellings made from rectangles of fired earth, concrete and wood. Perhaps, in thinking through this puzzling difference, they might even arrive at catching an echo of the adventurous spirit of the Grey Nomads!”
Click here for more information on ‘Discarded’.
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