On the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains – Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’.
What will humanity leave behind us? At least since St John wrote his trippy visions in Revelations, humans have pondered what will be left after The End of the World As We Know It. Revelations foresaw a new Heaven and a new Earth (much as the Vikings envisioned a sole couple surviving the Ragnarök, to repopulate the Earth).
But what of a post-human future? Planet of the Apes famously depicted the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty. Clifford Simak’s City envisioned a future where humans are extinct and Earth belongs to intelligent dogs (who tell legends of the mythical human race) and ants who build increasingly industrialised colonies. Similarly, John Wyndham’s Wanderers of Time showed a future inhabited by collectively intelligent ants. Rather more bleak, H G Wells’ ‘Time Traveller’ visits a far-future Earth where the Sun is a red giant and the only sign of life is a repellent, black, football-shaped, tentacled object flopping fitfully on the shore of a dead sea.
But what if the ultimate legacy of humanity is… chicken bones?
We might like to imagine that future archaeologists or aliens who visit Earth will uncover our magnificent monuments, our massive cities, or perhaps even our personal diaries. However, a team of researchers argued in a 2018 study, published in Royal Society Open Science, that the best-preserved evidence of modern mankind will be all the chicken bones we left behind.
Consider, after all, just how much of what we know of ancient civilisations comes from their rubbish heaps. From shell middens to potsherds, humans leave an awful lot of junk behind for posterity. Even the earliest-known fragments of the Gospel of Mark were found in a rubbish heap in Egypt.
Chicken may not be the most widely consumed meat in the world – that would be pork – but experts think chicken will likely surpass pork in the near future. And since we’re largely leaving the chicken bones untouched, a whole lot of them have been littered across the planet in landfills. One day, they might be the single greatest marker of mankind, especially considering how quickly humans have modified those chicken bones.
While claims of a so-called ‘Anthropocene’ are mostly based on eco-catastrophic drivel, there is no doubt that humans have had a profound effect on the environment. Especially in our pursuit of food.
Because of this influence, once the modern human civilization eventually vanishes, there will still be some significant effects on Earth that mark our existence in history. If a 2018 study is correct, then the greatest legacy that humans leave behind will be chicken bones.
The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, posited that the remains of domesticated chickens will be a major marker of our civilization and our changing biosphere, partly because there are so many of them.
Back in the heyday of the Dunedin sound, a public radio programme on Melbourne’s Triple R dedicated to NZ music was called Outnumbered by Sheep. Humanity as a whole is vastly outnumbered by chickens.
As of 2020, the global chicken population reached more than 33 billion, making them the most abundant domesticated animal in the whole world. That also means that chickens far outnumber humans, as the world’s population of people is believed to stand at just over 8.2 billion.
Which means that, when the Great Chicken Uprising begins, each of us will have to fight four chickens.
And don’t discount the possibility too fast. Humans have rapidly altered the humble chicken over the last century.
Chickens grown in these factory-like facilities are specially bred to grow faster and bigger than they did decades ago, but that also causes them to be incapable of living life normally. They often spend their short lives in incredibly cramped conditions, with bodies too big for their joints, to be slaughtered and fed to millions upon millions of people.
It’s only a matter of time before they go full Skynet and become self-aware – and very angry. Better tool up, just in case, brothers.
Meanwhile, why should chicken bones be so much more likely to be humanity’s ossuary, rather than cows or pork?
After all, unless they’re somehow preserved, bones don’t typically stick around forever. It takes longer than soft tissue, but bones do decay – except, some researchers argue, modern chicken bones might not degrade.
Chickens that are raised for their meat today have evolved a specific (and bizarre) skeletal structure unique to the modern human era. Due to the way they were bred and fed to grow faster and bigger, specifically for human consumption, they’ve been left with unnaturally giant, porous bones.
Researchers compared the unique bones of these modern birds to their ancestors and concluded that the chicken bones of today will become fossilized as a representation of when humans dominated Earth.
And future, alien, archaeologists will write scholarly theses on our most revered god: The Colonel.
