The impact humans have made on Earth is vast and unprecedented in nature, researchers say, and the footprint we are creating with material goods unique to mankind deserves its own name: technofossils.
While dinosaurs and other extinct forms of life left their bones and footprints behind for scientists to discover, humans will also leave a footprint for future generations to study, researcher Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in Britain says.
That footprint is different from anything else produced by animals in the history of the Earth, he said.
"Paleontologists call preserved animal-made structures trace fossils. Most animal species make only one - or at most a very few - different types of trace," Zalasiewicz said. "For example, dinosaurs made footprints and worms leave burrows. Just one species, though -- Homo sapiens -- now manufactures literally millions of different types of traces that range from nano-scale to city-sized."
Unlike animal trace fossils, which show little change in their evolution over millions of years, human-created objects evolve at lightning speed, Zalasiewicz and Leicester research partner Mark Williams said, as our factories bring new goods to market each year and make old ones obsolete.
With objects cast off and littering the landscape, many will eventually be covered in sediment, "well on the way to becoming technofossils," Zalasiewicz said.
The human impact on Earth, and the evident it will leave behind, is unprecedented since our planet formed over four and a half billion years ago, Zalasiewicz and Williams said.
Technofossils can range from infrastructure such as highways, cities and airports down to mobile phones, ballpoint pens and toothbrushes -- everything humans build or manufacture -- and will become humanity's equivalent of the dinosaur's footprint, the researchers said in their study published in the journal The Anthopocene Review.
"Millions of years from now, long after humans have gone, technofossils will be the defining imprint on the strata of the human epoch that people increasingly call the Anthropocene, " Williams said. "If any paleontologists were to appear on -- or visit -- the Earth in the far geological future, they will think the technofossil layer more weird and wonderful, by far, than dinosaur bones. It's something to think about when you next park the wheelie bin at the end of the drive."
