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Thursday, January 10, 2019

Why your chicken wings mean we’ve entered a new epoch

Our future in the Anthropocene, the new age now we live in, looks just like the lives of the 66 billion chickens consumed every year: nasty, brutish and short Have you ever thought much about the bones that remain littered in front of you after finishing a plate of chicken wings? New research suggests that _Gallus gallus domesticus _–_ _the modern factory farmed chicken – might not be just a Sunday lunch staple but instead a marker of a new age in Earth’s history. The 11,700 or so years following the last major ice age are collectively called the Holocene, a geological chapter in earth’s biography that includes the development of all human civilization. Some experts argue that humans have fundamentally altered the earth’s biosphere to the point where we now live in a new age called the Anthropocene, an amalgamation of the Greek words for “new” and “human”. Copernicus was wrong: the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun anymore. It revolves around us. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com