Well, there are human fossiles aswell and we have been here for a pretty short time.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Speed running fucking it up too
Does getting buried in pumice count as becoming a fossil? Because Pompeii was only a couple thousand years ago.
From wikipedia: A fossil (from Classical Latin fossilis, lit. 'obtained by digging')[1] is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age.
Answer: yes. It does count. Specifically carbonization.
Personal take: when I think of a "fossil", I think of the stereotypical mineralized bones. Like the T-Rex in the museum of natural history that most people have seen from various movies and TV shows. Thinking of human and human predecessor bones as fossils is just weird to me.
Is Pompeii from a past geological age?
2000 years ago doesn't seem important on geological time scales.
Okay so even though I read all this last night, I somehow missed the "2000 - (-2000) years" thus making the current geological age around 4000 years, and technically Pompeii would not count in the strictest definition. That said, had it happened 4,000 years ago, absolutely nothing would have changed. All the stuff would still be carbonized.
~~Also from Wikipedia in the (geological age) article: An age is the smallest hierarchical geochronologic unit. It is equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage.[14][13] There are 96 formal and five informal ages.[2] The current age is the Meghalayan.~~
~~So again the answer is "yes it counts" but my personal take is "it feels weird to consider 4,000-10,000 ago multiple different geologic ages"~~
Reading through Geologic time scale, it defines an age as equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage, which it says are normally millions of years. But you're right, interestingly the current Meghalayan age only started 4,200 years ago.
It seems all the recent ages are only a few thousand years each (until 2018 the last 10,000 or so were one age, but this was split in three in 2018).
After all that reading I still didn't really understand how they decided that this was a new age.
But anyway, I agree there isn't going to be any difference between 2,000 and 4,000 years so we might as well consider Pompeii fossilised even if not strictly true under the definition. I'm just surprised we consider anything within human history to be a previous geological age, but it seems we do.
Well, there are plenty of hominid fossils and we humans are plentiful.
[off topic]
The Gryphon's Skull is a fun read. Two Greek traders, circa 300 BC, discover a dinosaur fossil...
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gryphon-s-skull-harry-turtledove/8156325?ean=9781612421421&next=t
So, technically there could be a paleantology dinosaur?
Paleosaurus (that's a real word)
Yes, just like there are archeologists digging human fossilized bones now.