The modern broiler chicken exemplifies the rapid evolution of livestock driven by industrial agriculture. In 1925 an average chicken weighed 2.5 lb after 112 days and required 4.7 lb of feed per pound of live weight. Today, a broiler reaches 6.57 lb in just 47 days, consuming only 1.69 lb of feed per pound of meat.
After slaughter, chickens are transported in large containers to processing plants where they are strapped to conveyor belts, flipped, plunged into water, washed in an electrical bath, and decapitated. This mechanised process, described as a form of “electronarcosis,” is carried out on a scale of about seventy‑five billion birds annually, making poultry the world’s most consumed meat.
Because of their sheer numbers—roughly four chickens for every human—broilers are likely to leave a distinct fossil record. Their oversized sternums, drumsticks and wing bones, which mummify in anaerobic landfill conditions, could become a geological signature of the Anthropocene, the proposed new epoch defined by human impact.
The term “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000 at an International Geosphere‑Biosphere Programme meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico, when atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen urged that the era of planetary change be formally recognized. Although the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy voted against formally adopting the epoch in 2024, the concept has entered scientific and public discourse as a framework for understanding humanity’s influence on Earth’s systems.
Scientists now view the mid‑twentieth century, marked by the Great Acceleration of industrial activity, as a potential stratigraphic marker. In future sediment cores, a thin layer of radioactive fallout, plastic pollution, and the fossilized remains of broiler chickens could serve as a precise timestamp of the Anthropocene’s onset.