Chicken bones and distorting timelines
With regard to the article by Damian Carrington ('Technofossils': how humanity's eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones, 22 February), the geologists Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz are right to point to the extraordinary stratigraphic legacy of technofossils like plastics, textiles and concrete, and associated biological matter such as the billions of factory-farmed chicken bones in landfill.
But they are wrong to link the increasing size and abundance of chicken bones in strata with a precisely defined 'start' of the Anthropocene. As with plastics and concrete, the signal of chicken bones, while clearly an intensifying one, is manifestly spread out through time and space, and cannot be pinned down to a single date.
One can agree with Gabbott and Zalasiewicz on the massive and often toxic legacy of these and other technofossil materials accumulating in ground and oceans in recent times, and the need to tackle the situation, without accepting the imposition of a 1950 timeline, which distorts understanding.
Surely it is time to start thinking about such matters outside the limiting frame of the geological timescale, which can only grasp human-induced Earth system change in terms of a sudden transition from one time unit to another. This leads to an undue concern with specifying an exact moment of start.Matthew EdgeworthBedford
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