Future archaeologists will dig up CHICKENS to date modern life in Britain
We kill 60 billion chickens every year, and their bones will in future mark the age of humanity
HUMANS eat so much chicken that archaeologists of the future will use the leftover bones to date the modern era.
We kill 60billion of the birds every year, and their remains will one day serve as a marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene – the name scientists give to the 'age of humanity'.
This is because the 20th century has seen such an explosion in chicken farming that it has grossly mutated the biology of the birds, a study shows.
More than 23billion broiler chickens – the birds we use for meat – exist at any one time.
Since the 1950s, broilers have been bred by humans to grow twice as big and put on weight at five times the speed of their natural ancestors.
This quick change in bone and muscle structure would normally take millions of years via evolution, but mankind has had the same impact in just a few decades.
The change is so startling that the bones we leave behind in landfills will serve as an archaeological marker for the impact humanity had on the planet, say scientists at the University of Leicester.
"The broiler (meat) chicken outweighs all wild birds put together by three to one. We are living on the planet of the chicken," study author Dr Carys Bennett wrote in a piece for the Conversation.
"The record of this human-engineered bird will be forever set in stone."
The ancestor of the broiler is the red jungle fowl, which is native to tropical South East Asia.
The bird was first domesticated about 6,000 years ago, beginning a slow progression toward the fatter farm chickens we know today.
But chickens really changed after the 1950s, when the "chicken-of-tomorrow programme" was launched in the US in an attempt to breed bigger birds for meat.
For the new study, scientists studied chicken bones dug at archaeological sites in London to show how this sudden change can already be spotted in preserved remains.
Modern broiler chickens are radically different from their ancestors, with a super-sized skeleton and strange bone chemistry that reflects their uniform diet and poor genetic diversity.
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Future generations looking through fossilised rock will spot tiny cans, glass bottles, plastics and chicken bones, Dr Bennett said.
"Across the world, chicken is the most commonly eaten meat," Dr Bennett said.
"This has made it a vivid symbol of the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch that marks the overwhelming impact of humans on the Earth’s surface geological processes.
"The modern bird is now so changed from its ancestors, that its distinctive bones will undoubtedly become fossilised markers of the time when humans reigned the planet," she added.
Are you surprised by how different chicken ancestors looked? Let us know in the comments!
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