The books will tell you that cats evolved from civet ancestors about 45 million years ago, which was definitely a good start. Get as much distance between yourself and the civets as possible, that was the motto of the early cats. The civet cat has been a very nervous animal ever since it discovered that you can, er, derive civetone

It is.

So, the story goes, the cat family pushed on with the evolving as fast as possible, going in for size, speed and ferocity. There's nothing like the fear that you might be mistaken for a civet for giving jets to your genes, especially when you know it's only a matter of millennia before your actual proto-hominids start wandering around the Holocenic landscape with a bottle, a knife and a speculative look in their eyes. They also spread out a bit but missed Australia, which had just gone past on the Continental Drift; this explains why the rats grew so big. Some got stripes, some tried spots. One well known early variety developed its very own do-it-yourself can opener a hundred thousand years before cat food came in tins, and died of being too early to take advantage of this.

And then, suddenly, small versions started toturn up and go mee-owp, mee-owp at people.

Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new “fire” stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst ofthem wanders into the cave and starts to purr.

More amazing yet, it didn't get et.

Dogs you can understand. They're pack creatures, humans are just another, brighter, pack leader. Dogs are handy for helping you run down things that are faster than you are. But cats—well, from Early Man's point of view, cats are good for nothing.