Original subtitles

What would happen

if every human being on earth...

Disappeared?

No matter how we might vanish,

this is the story of what could happen

to the world we leave behind.

Now,

life after people hits home.

The buildings we live in are our castles

and they say, "Home is where the heart is."

But when we're gone, what comes knocking?

In vast suburbs, modern houses are under assault

from the outside and from the inside out.

It looks like the entire city

was put in the microwave on high.

This house has turned to Swiss cheese.

Condominiums everywhere get new residents

by the thousands.

Cockroaches will eat literally anything.

It's the home invasion of your worst fears.

No matter how well-built,

every home would be swallowed by decay.

It shows you how delicate paradise really is.

And in the heartland,

farmsteads that were once the cornerstone

of the American dream become beastly nightmares.

It's pretty incredible

how quickly domesticated pigs go feral.

They look almost unrecognizable.

In a world without people,

the places we lived are taken over, taken down,

and our most precious memories are erased.

Welcome to Earth.

Population,

zero.

All around the globe, homes are abandoned.

From major cities like Paris and Chicago

to the suburbs and rural areas that surround them.

In Mesa, Arizona, the biggest suburb in the United States,

no children play in backyards,

no parents stroll the sidewalks,

the houses sit empty,

every room is silent,

every hallway eerily still.

But one sound remains:

the low hum of what once made life in these homes possible,

even in the brutal heat of the Sonoran Desert:

air conditioning.

These deserts shouldn't be fit for human life,

but somehow, people call them home.

Air conditioning is absolutely crucial

in places as hot as Mesa.

Lifeless and scorched by the sun,

humans rolled the dice on the desert

and forced it to bend to our will.

Most of these large houses

are built with black shingle roofs

and giant picture windows.

They look great from the outside.

Without air conditioning,

those roofs suck up heat from the sun

and turn those upper floors into a heat sink.

Then, those picture windows act like panes in a greenhouse,

letting in sunlight and trapping the heat inside.

In the time of people,

air conditioning was the lifeblood of every home.

Now, there's no one left to adjust the temperature,

no one to enjoy the cool.

But 70 miles away,

the electric heart of the biggest nuclear power plant

in the country still beats,

powering the surrounding suburbs:

the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.

Palo Verde is the only desert nuclear plant

in the Western Hemisphere

and the only one in the country

that's not located next to a natural body of water.

Most plants are built near rivers, lakes, or oceans,

so they can use that water to cool their reactors.

In the parched and sweltering Arizona desert,

humanity found another way to cool Palo Verde's fuel rods,

one that flows not through a riverbend or along a coastline,

but through the sewers.

Instead of a natural water source,

Palo Verde has an automated system

that pulls treated sewage water

from cities like Phoenix, Mesa, and Tempe

and pumps it into reservoirs and cooling towers.

Going to the bathroom in Mesa

is almost like performing a civic duty

because every time you flush your toilet,

you're helping to cool a nuclear reactor.

The reactors still hum with power

not because of human hands,

but because of the systems they left behind,

a web of automated fail-safes

designed to keep the unimaginable at bay.

We all know the names Chernobyl,

Three Mile Island, Fukushima.

'Cause they were unbelievable disasters

with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

Palo Verde Nuclear Plant

was designed to prevent exactly that kind of disaster.

The Chernobyl disaster

caused nearly 200,000 homes to be evacuated,

many of them eventually destroyed.

Two days after people,

there's no one in Palo Verde's controller room,

no technicians keeping watch,

and the plant's automated systems rely on human oversight.

The system is constantly monitored by operators

who can make adjustments and respond to alerts.

If the system senses that nobody is responding to it,

it immediately triggers a shutdown.

Before a meltdown happens, a mechanism is triggered.

That drops a control rod into the core,

halting, or at least dramatically slowing,

the nuclear reaction.

As it was designed to do,

the system shuts the reactors down.

But even then, the danger doesn't die.

Spent fuel rods still radiate an unholy heat

powerful enough to melt through steel, concrete,

and anything that stands in its way.

Used-up fuel rods

stay dangerously hot and radioactive for years.

That's why they're stored under water in cooling pools

to prevent them from overheating or catching fire.

The cooling pools

are the plant's last line of defense.

But to keep the simmering rods from overheating,

pumps have to constantly move cold water in

and hot water out.

The cooling pump system would still be working

because there are backup generators

that work on diesel fuel.

In a world without people,

there's no one to maintain the generators,

no one to refill their tanks.

What will happen when the power eventually grinds to a halt?

Far from the sprawling desert suburbs

lies one of the condominium capitals of the country:

Miami.

Once, more than half a million units

were alive with laughter,

the sound of shared meals and music.

Now, all that remains are empty tables,

echoes of people who will never come home again.

Almost 1/3 of Miami's housing stock is condominiums.

That's the highest percentage

of any major city in the United States,

which goes to show that the ideal

of the white picket fence in the suburbs

isn't always what the American dream looks like.

One week after people,

something has been hiding in plain sight,

lingering in the air, and already hard at work.

Miami has what's called a tropical monsoon climate.

Basically, because of the surrounding warm ocean,

Biscayne Bay, and regular afternoon rain,

it's humid all day, every day.

Most of the older condos in Miami Beach

were built out of porous materials.

Not only would humidity and moisture

get into the buildings quickly,

they would start to do damage almost immediately.

Miami's power grid has been down for days

and every condo in the city is sizzling in the heat.

Without ventilation and air conditioning,

the temperature could spike up to 100 degrees.

Within a few days, food would rot,

condensation would form on counters and walls,

and all that heat and humidity would start to warp the wood.

The scent of rot fills the air;

decay spreads like fog through condos across the city.

It's an unspoken invitation to nature's perfect pest.

Cockroaches would waste no time

finding all the little cracks and crevices to get inside.

Roaches would love to eat exactly the kind of trash

that would be festering in the heat and humidity:

moldy cheese, spoiled meat,

they even like to drink the garbage juice as it decomposes.

Once they've gotten through all the trash

and the rotten food left behind,

they'll move on to other things like book bindings,

old mail, the carcasses of dead house pets,

even things like old skin cells, hair, and nail clippings.

Americans actually used to spend millions of dollars

on exterminators,

trying to keep cockroaches in check,

but those defense systems are gone.

After people, there's no one to lay down traps,

no one to spray pesticide.

And cockroaches aren't just devouring everything in sight,

they're multiplying.

Cockroaches love the heat and the humidity,

especially the American and Asian species

that you find in Miami.

Cockroaches are cold-blooded.

Warmer temperatures give them more energy.

That means they fly more, eat more,

and make more roaches more.

Cockroaches are disgusting nightmare fuel.

A single pair of can produce up to 400,000 descendants

in a single year,

and it only takes babies about 35 days to mature.

Without pest control,

just a few cockroaches can become a full-on infestation

in no time at all.

Inside abandoned homes,

the cockroaches are sheltered from natural predators,

and they're spreading.

Cockroaches have no problem

traveling between units with shared walls.

That's because they can compress

their flexible exoskeletons down

to at least half their normal size,

and they splay their legs out,

making them able to go through even the tiniest of cracks

without slowing down.

Once home to a family of four,

this condo is now a kingdom of cockroaches.

They're burrowed beneath the floorboards,

pulsing behind the walls.

With the power off, they ride and feast in the dark.

But one thing still glows, small, forgotten,

a pilot light burns,

waiting to turn infestation into ignition.

The Arizona suburbs

were once home to millions of people.

Now, the streets are silent, every house abandoned.

And just weeks after people at the nuclear power plant

that used to power these neighborhoods,

backup generators

are now the only thing keeping emergency pumps pumping

and spent fuel rods from melting down.

There's enough diesel on hand to keep the pumps running,

but only if there's someone there to refill them.

With no one to refuel their tanks,

the generators choke on the last fumes of diesel.

The pumps sputter and die.

Slumber and fuel rods begin to stir

not to supply power to the surrounding suburbs,

but to bring annihilation.

The water would start to evaporate slowly at first

and then faster.

The water in the cooling pools boils off,

exposing the fuel rods to air.

To put it mildly, this is bad.

The fuel rods are coated in zirconium,

which is stable under water,

but is dangerous when it's exposed to the air.

Because once zirconium is out of the water,

it can react chemically with steam,

releasing hydrogen gas.

And hydrogen gas is explosive.

Like,

hydrogen gas is what caused the Hindenburg to explode.

Hydrogen gas hangs in the air, growing thick,

until it meets a spark.

And all at once, it explodes.

This isn't a nuclear explosion, it's a chemical one,

but the damage is catastrophic.

Once a fire takes hold in a spent fuel pool,

it's nearly impossible to stop.

The smoke can carry radioactive material hundreds of miles.

The power plant is being consumed from within;

radiation spilling out of every new breach of its walls.

The toxic clouds spit out by the fire rises on the wind,

moving toward the nearby suburbs,

killing anything living,

blanketing block after block of houses

in corrosive isotopes and gamma radiation.

How long before the homes of Mesa, Arizona

are nothing but dust?

In rural Pennsylvania,

there are no pickup trucks traveling the dirt roads,

no shoppers at the general store.

On a small farm,

there's a homestead that stood for nearly 200 years,

but now, no one calls it home.

The key to making these homes long-lasting

is using old growth lumber,

which comes from trees grown naturally

for hundreds or even thousands of years.

The natural growth process makes old growth wood sturdy

and resistant to rot.

Not only were the houses meant to last,

but the homesteads themselves

were meant to be self-sustaining.

You'll find pens for livestock,

wells to access fresh water,

and root cellars to store vegetables.

And in the right conditions,

foods like potatoes, squash, and pears can last for months.

This homestead has housed and fed families

since decades before the Civil War.

But just one week after people, some crops are withering,

others are growing unchecked.

And it ends in paddocks,

livestock is neglected and hungry.

A pig eats about 4% of its body weight a day,

and they can weigh as much as 800 pounds.

So basically,

a pig would need to eat a large bag of dog food,

enough to last a big dog about a month every single day.

Pigs aren't picky eaters.

They'll eat just about anything: roots, bugs, other animals.

They've even been known to eat an entire human corpse,

bones and all, in less than eight hours.

The pigs have devoured everything in their pen,

including the wooden fences themselves,

relics of farmers now gone forever.

Pigs are among the top five smartest animals around.

Some studies suggest

that they're about as smart as a three-year-old human.

Between their size and their smarts,

it wouldn't take much for them

to find a way out of their pens.

They can just dig up fencing

and break down just about anything in their way.

Two weeks after people,

the pigs have eaten through crops like a disease,

but their hunger is insatiable.

And now, they have a craving for fresh meat.

Chickens have been domesticated

for more than 10,000 years,

so one would think that without people around,

they'd be helpless.

But remarkably, without people, they do quite well.

With no one to feed them,

they're gonna revert to their primitive instincts,

pecking for ants, and grubs, and any seeds they can find.

Even without human hands to care for them,

the chickens are plump and healthy.

They're also locked in their coop,

a perfect target for pigs,

ravenous and on the prowl.

Over 1,000 miles to the south, months after people,

Miami's abandoned condominiums are being remodeled,

with new carpets and wallpaper

made of wriggling cockroaches,

gnawing through everything they touch,

burrowing into every crack and crevice.

And here's where it gets ugly.

Cockroaches, they leave their droppings,

molted shells, and even their bodies.

The power's out,

but some old gas stoves still have a flickering flame.

That's the pilot light,

which doesn't need electricity to burn.

It's fed by a tiny, steady stream of gas

designed to keep flowing for months or even years.

The mess builds up around a pilot assembly,

jamming the valve that controls the gas flow.

The result is a stuck open gas line.

Now you've got gas spreading throughout a condo unit.

It's going under the doors,

out into the hallway, into other units.

In the time of people,

simple maintenance and routine inspection

would eliminate the threat.

Now, gas is seeping through condo units

like poison through veins.

What will happen when it finally touches the pilot light

flickering in the dark?

Two months after people, Miami is a ghost town.

A fire caused by a gas leak and a flickering pilot light

has engulfed a condo,

threatening all the units people once called home.

Remember, in a high rise like this,

everything's connected.

That means shared walls,

shared ventilation, shared gas lines.

So now that initial explosion cracks open even more lines,

releasing even more gas, it's a chain reaction.

Boom, boom, boom.

Always become fire tunnels.

In minutes, a big part of the building is in flames.

And just like that, it's a flowing inferno.

Just as the flames

threaten to leap across blocks and engulf the city,

something shifts in the air,

and the very humidity that helped cause the fire

gives rise to the only thing that can stop it.

In the summer, Miami often gets heavy rain,

often in the form of brief, but intense, thunderstorms.

A single storm can unleash two to three inches of rain

in mere minutes.

The heavens rain down

what looks like salvation,

but it's a wolf hidden in sheep's clothing,

eager to infiltrate and attack.

Now imagine that kind of downpour

slamming into a building already cracked open and crumbling.

Torrents of rain crashed through broken windows,

soaking the carpet walls and wiring.

The rain pours through every crack,

soaking drywall, pulling on floors.

The rain puts out the fire,

but brings its own kind of destruction.

Just months after people,

condo buildings all over Florida

are cracking, leaking, bending, and buckling.

But there's one building that towers above the rest,

resolute and unbowed.

It's 84 luxury condos' indoor infinity pool

and private helipad,

where once home to the richest elites,

now it lies as silent as a tomb,

a monument to the wealthiest members of a dead civilization.

One Thousand Museum was designed more like a yacht

than a condo,

using marine-grade wood, stone, glass, and minimal carpet.

Plus, the triple-sealed hurricane windows

and thermal insulation

will prevent it from getting too hot in there.

It might get a little uncomfortable,

but its materials were handpicked

to deal with those conditions.

While most of Miami festers,

this residential tower refuses to rot.

But father time is patient.

How long before this tower succumbs as well?

Six months after people,

at a farm that was once home to a hardworking family,

the ravenous grunting of pigs

fills the air outside the chicken coop.

No longer fed by humans,

the pigs are starving and aggressive,

and fresh poultry is on the menu.

Chicken coops are designed to keep out coyotes,

raccoons, and other birds.

Your garden-variety, lightweight predator.

Pigs love to root,

and they can easily get their snouts

two to three feet deep under the soil.

And chicken coop foundations

are typically only a foot to a foot and a half deep,

so pigs would have no trouble working their way inside.

Once they're under the foundations,

there is nothing to stop these pigs

from entering the coop and wreaking havoc.

They would eat what's left to the chicken feed,

they would eat any eggs in the coop,

and then they would eat the chickens.

The most accessible food

has now been gobbled up,

and the once-docile pigs turn their attention

to the farmhouse itself.

But while the home has barely changed in hundreds of years,

the pigs are quickly transforming,

shedding domestication like a snake sloughs off its skin.

It's pretty incredible

how quickly domesticated pigs go feral

and start to resemble the wild boars that they descend from.

This can start to happen within weeks.

And by the time a year has gone by,

they become almost unrecognizable.

Their hair starts to grow coarser and darker in color,

the males start to grow prominent tusks.

They get leaner and more muscular

with increased foraging and rooting.

Their behavior starts to change as well.

As they get wilder,

the pigs' snouts elongate a bit

and their sense of smell gets even better,

which is saying something

because even domesticated pigs

can smell food buried 25 feet underground.

As they go feral, pigs start to become nocturnal.

And feral pigs are known to become highly aggressive.

This is no longer a sounder of swine.

It's a beastly-wrecking crew.

Food inside the old farmhouse

is beckoning to them like a siren song.

Can this sturdy home keep the hogs at bay,

or will they bring it all crashing down?

Six months after people,

this small family farmstead is in disarray.

Once neat rows of crops have been ripped from the soil

and devoured by ravenous feral pigs.

The farmhouse has been home to generations

standing strong through 40 presidents, countless blizzards,

and two World Wars.

Now, hooves scrape the doors,

snouts root at foundations,

the hungry hogs are desperate to get inside.

The pigs would be lured

by the smells coming from inside the farmhouse.

If they get hungry and desperate enough,

they will try anything to get inside.

They may look like lumbering wrecking balls,

but pigs are surprisingly fast.

They can run up to 11 miles per hour.

So, if one takes aim at the front door of a house,

it's like launching a bowling ball at it.

The pigs break in like thieves,

but they don't bother with stealth.

They're brazen, remorseless, and destructive.

Pigs bite with enough force to break some human bones,

so it'd be easy work to tear off cupboard or closet doors

to get at what's stored inside.

These pigs would devour any dried goods left behind:

flour, oat, cereals, you name it.

And if they were able to crack open that fridge door,

I'm sure they would be happy to eat

whatever year-old biohazard they would find inside.

If anything kept in jars fell off the shelves,

they'd eat it,

probably sucking up some broken glass at the same time.

And I don't know if they could bite open canned food,

but they would sure as hell try.

And let's just be clear about one thing.

Pigs are not polite.

They're pigs.

Even the trace smell of old food

is gonna drive them into a frenzy.

They will destroy furniture, they will tear up floorboards,

they will smash holes in the wall.

If they find any possible weak spot,

like water damage or rotten siding,

they're just gonna plow right through that.

Once home to the family who fed and kept them,

the feral pigs have turned this farmhouse

into a splintered husk.

Now, they leave it behind to maraud through the countryside.

In Mesa, Arizona,

the biggest suburb in the country is quiet,

but looks almost unchanged.

Cars are still parked in driveways,

water ripples in backyard pools.

But just like in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters,

an invisible toxic wind from the Palo Verde nuclear meltdown

has blown over 100 miles from the plant.

It's touched every surface,

found every crack and open window,

sparing nothing in this once-peaceful suburb.

These homes may look picture perfect from the curb,

but they're actually saturated

with a poison that you can't see, smell, or escape.

Gamma radiation rains down on everything

alongside hot isotopes, like Caesium-137 and Strontium-90,

coating the landscape and every house in sight.

To give you a sense of scale,

just 1/30 of an ounce of Caesium-137,

that's a single sunflower seed,

can make a whole square mile uninhabitable.

Now imagine several pounds of this stuff.

The fallout seeps into lungs,

wrecking organs almost immediately.

Within hours, the smallest animals,

like squirrels and rabbits, start to drop.

Faster metabolisms mean they soak up the most the quickest.

By day two, bigger animals, like deer and coyotes, follow.

Over time,

radiation eats away at these big suburban homes,

corroding metals, breaking down plastics,

and the air inside becomes dangerously radioactive.

The radiation gnaws at these homes

from the outside,

but deep beneath the suburban concrete,

something else lurks hidden from the poison.

They're tiny, resilient, and hungry.

The biggest suburb in the world

is being consumed by toxic dust.

But there's something else crawling and burrowing

beneath the homes that line these streets,

something that survived the initial wave of fallout.

Not a cockroach, but its much smaller cousin.

Termites are extremely common in Mesa,

and there's a good chance

they would've survived the radiation

from the Palo Verde plant.

A lot of termites live in nests several feet underground,

which would provide protection

from that initial blast of toxicity.

Insects like cockroaches and termites

are famously resistant to radiation,

much more so than humans or other mammals.

Now, organic cells are most susceptible to radiation

when they're dividing.

And in the human body,

we've got millions of cells dividing every single day.

But a termite, it only divides its cells when it's molting.

Couple that with their extremely rapid

reproductive cycles,

and termites could very well adapt

to a post-meltdown environment

just like scientists have witnessed

in the area around Chernobyl.

The termites bide their time,

then they creep from their nests like a plague,

swarming toward the wooden foundations

of Mesa's suburban homes.

Their diets consist mainly

of decaying plant materials and wood.

And one particular species, a subterranean termite,

is so ubiquitous it's better known as the Arizona termite.

It also happens to be the species of termite

that is most destructive to homes.

All it takes is a tiny, tiny crack in the foundations,

less than 1/16 of an inch, and they're in.

The termites feast on support beams,

frames, and foundations.

And without human exterminators to keep them in check,

their population skyrockets.

A termite queen

lays approximately 40,000 eggs per day

and has a life expectancy of nearly 20 years.

The colony never sleeps and never stops eating.

The biggest suburb in the world

is decaying from the outside and being consumed from within.

How long before there's nothing left but dust?

20 years after people, in Miami,

One Thousand Museum is now dirty, aging, worn down.

But the building itself still stands proud.

A minor hurricane is roiling the skies offshore,

but this tower, once home to the ultra-rich,

has a secret weapon humanity left behind to defend it.

The building is tailor-made for Miami's harsh environment.

There are 5,000 pieces of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete

that form kind of an exoskeleton around the building,

like a giant brace that can resist the force of wind

during major storms.

One Thousand Museum's aerodynamic shape

breaks up wind pressure,

the kind of turbulence

that can shake and rattle a tall building.

And every unit has special impact-resistant windows

that can withstand something like a two-by-four hurled at it

at up to 100 miles an hour.

Other condo buildings aren't so lucky.

They're cracked and sagging; bones already weakened.

Now there's no seawall, no flood control,

no first responders,

just a 12-story building weakened by fire,

teetering on soggy ground as the storm slams into it.

There will be a sickening crack from below.

The foundations,

already stressed from rising groundwater,

start to literally shear off.

Concrete snaps, rebar buckles,

one floor pancakes onto the next,

and dust and debris shoot out like a volcanic blast.

12 stories crumple like a tower of wet playing cards,

each floor crushing the next.

As the condo crashes into the sea,

there are no people left to mourn its demise,

no crews to rebuild it,

only a twisted metal and concrete corpse

reclaimed by the sea.

In Arizona, decades of radioactive fallout

and the hungry termites who survived it

have turned the suburb into the lifeless ruins

of a lost civilization.

They don't devour large chunks of wood.

Instead, they burrow tunnels into the wood,

which weakens its overall structure,

compromising the structural integrity of the entire home.

One by one,

the once sprawling homes,

prized symbols of a safe middle class life,

have been reduced to piles of rubble.

This house has been made brittle by nuclear fallout.

It's turned to Swiss cheese by ravenous termites,

and now it's just too fragile to hold its own weight,

so gravity deals the final blow.

100 years after people,

the houses that were once home

to hundreds of thousands of people

in the biggest suburb in America have crumbled into dust,

leaving behind a barren wasteland.

But even here in the parched silence and toxic soil,

new life emerges.

Nuclear radiation once made this place a dead zone.

But now, the worst isotopes are gone.

Even Caesium-137 has lost most of its bites.

So if you look carefully,

you might see cracks in the pavement blooming with weeds,

you might see lizards scurrying through the ruins.

The streets are buried under sand,

but mesquite and scrub are growing again,

tumbleweeds roll down the highways

like a scene out of a forgotten western,

except this one's set in a weird post-apocalyptic suburbia.

In place of manicured lawns,

towering saguaros now rise like desert kings

staking their claim,

where once porch swings and garden gnomes used to sit.

After a century without people

under that unforgiving Arizona sun,

it would almost feel like humans never existed at all.

150 years after people,

the Pennsylvania farmhouse

that saw generation after generation thrive

and grow beneath its roof is now broken;

its bones laid bare.

These old fieldstone foundations can be very strong,

but time is taking its toll.

For years,

the foundations of the farmhouse

have been sitting wide open to the elements.

The house is dismantled bit by bit.

Most of the home is gone,

but its foundation remains,

anchored in the earth like the roots of a great tree,

a monument to the farmers that once worked this land.

In Miami, what was once the condo capital of the country

has been lashed by wind, inundated by rain,

and pounded by waves.

What's left in the city is nearly unrecognizable.

But above the curling, gripping vines of new growth,

One Thousand Museum still stands.

One Thousand Museum has weathered decades of storm,

heat, and rising seas,

thanks to its reinforced concrete exoskeleton

and cutting-edge design.

It was built to last; and so far, it has.

But even this,

the crown jewel of beachfront homes

can't escape the slow march of father time.

The glass panels are cracked,

and salt is crusting the facade.

The rain is seeping into seams

that were never meant to go unmaintained.

The rooftop pool would be a murky swamp,

by now likely covered in vegetation.

But, the futuristic exoskeleton

did exactly what it was built to do:

absorb stress, flex with the wind, hold its ground.

The outer shells scarred,

yes, there's cracked glass, there's twisted metal panels,

there's salt-stained concrete,

but the core structure is sound.

It looks battered, but it's not broken.

Eventually, perhaps centuries from now,

the saltwater will finally eat away

at the building's mighty cement foundations

and corrode the steel reinforcements.

500 years after people.

With a massive crack nobody hears,

the last survivor of Miami's skyline gives up the fight

and surrenders to her fate.

For millennia, the homes we built kept us safe,

sustained us, and kept the elements at bay.

But without us,

nature finds a way to reclaim everything we once built.

No matter how well-built, every home,

whether it's nestled in the suburbs,

built of the strongest stone,

or rising above the sea,

they were built to exist in a world with us.

And without us, even the strongest will, in time,

return to the earth.

If alien archeologists come digging someday,

they might find a few clues:

a warped metal patio chair,

maybe sun bleached, but still intact.

Just like the tools found in Egyptian tombs,

bronze chisels,

copper blades buried for thousands of years,

untouched by moisture, still recognizable.