100,000 years later, how will we be?

What clues about current civilizations will be explored by archaeologists for the next millennium? What will remain and what will be destroyed over time?

100,000 years later, what do juniors archaeologists discover about the current civilization? After so many years, only the luckiest artifacts were not crushed, recycled or decomposed. We personally don't leave anything that can last so long. To make it easier to visualize, turn back to the past just like that. 100,000 years ago, modern humans appeared in Africa and distributed throughout the world. And most of what we know about them is just speculation because the only remaining clue is stone tools and a few fossils.

You cannot leave your bones. Fossils are extremely rare clues, especially for us living on land. According to the paleontologist Kay Behrensmeyer of the American National Museum of History, the luckiest will be the formation of " instant fossils" when animals die in calcium-rich lakes and swamps or in cave. In those two cases, bones can mineralize fast enough for fossils to win the decomposition race.

Will we leave a laptop and a cup of coffee for the descendants?

Future fossil hunters will not find us in cemeteries because the body buried there will turn into ash within a few centuries. Instead, the richest human bone fields can be found in catastrophic debris such as volcanic ash or fine sediments left after recent tsunamis in Asia. Some bodies can be embalmed in peat bogs or desert areas but they can decompose when conditions change over a long period of 100,000 years.

Conditions of change also damage other important clues about our civilization: housing. Climate change and rising sea levels will submerge coastal cities. In that case, waves can destroy part of the buildings on the ground, the ground and the body will quickly be filled with sediment. Concrete can decompose after millennia, but archaeologists will recognize rectangular patterns of sand and gravel - a sign of purposeful design.

Nowhere are these designs more obvious in our largest architectures. Some artifacts of humanity, such as open mines, are geological features that will exist for hundreds of thousands of years as a testimony of the human 'tank-filling' power . Large dams like Hoover in the US and the Three Gorges in China contain huge amounts of concrete that some of them can survive for a long time. Some structures, most notably the Onkalo nuclear waste storage area in Finland, were designed to remain intact for 100,000 years.

We are also busy creating another huge legacy for future archaeologists: garbage. The landfill is the final destination of most goods and is an ideal place for long-term preservation. When full, a modern garbage bunker is usually sealed with a layer of clay that is impervious to the inside so that the garbage quickly becomes deficient in oxygen. According to expert Jean Bogner of the University of Illinois (USA), in such conditions, even organic materials such as fibers and natural wood can avoid decomposition.

A little material will still be preserved intact. Ceramic plates and cups of coffee will survive forever as a piece of prehistoric people. Some metals like iron will be eroded quickly but titanium, stainless steel, gold . will last much longer. In fact, titanium laptop enclosures can be one of the longest-lived artifacts of our civilization. Who knows, future scholars build complex theories about empty tablet-based religious practices and apple-shaped carvings on the surface!

The fact that no matter how much we try to preserve a legacy for future generations, we may never know which aspects of the current civilization will be of interest to descendants.