“If we were to judge ourselves by the efforts of ours that survive the passage of time, we’d be best described as Man the Rubbish Maker. We’ve been polluting since before we were human.
Chipping rocks into tools is a messy, haphazard process. When archeologists investigate ancient rock foundries, they always find vastly more rock waste than they ever find tools. Rock waste is the earliest form of pollution. It is an unsought, useless, and hazardous externality to a technological process.
Paleontologists have found flint-knapping workshops two and half million years old where the stone junk is still sharp enough to slash an unwary hand. The rock waste from prehuman workshops has lasted for geological time-scales. Their speech, their culture, their beliefs about time futurity – that’s gone like an exhaled breath.”
From Bruce Sterling’s sometimes excellent, sometimes weird “Shaping Things”, p. 56-57.