When a cat is excited by the rustle of the newspapers on the bed or chases a table tennis ball across the kitchen floor, he is responding to instincts all cats have had since prehistoric times, when early felines spied out and chased the first rodents.  

Merlin's most distant ancestor was a small, flesh-eating mammal called the miacis, who lived some 50 million years ago.  A bit like our modern weasel, it was a tenacious creature with a long body and short legs.  It is the ancestor Merlin shares with bears, raccoons, hyenas and dogs.

Three million years ago, man was still stumbling around, searching for his final shape.  But the cat was already formed.  The way he looks today was laid down very early in evolution.

Forty different kinds of cats emerged from the Pleistocene era a million years ago, the time of the great Ice ages, when only the fittest and most adaptable forms of life survived, and all are still around today in a similar and recognizable form.

Cats preceded dogs by some ten to twenty million years but dogs ended up getting themselves domesticated long before the cat.

Cats obviously avoided having too close a contact with civilization until it was advanced enough to keep them in the lap of luxury.  History's first recorded case of domestication in cats is in the Egypt of the Pharaohs four millennia ago.

But some sort of domestication of the cat species may well have happened long before when cavemen went out to kill a big cat and then took its cubs home as playthings for the cave children.

What saved the early cats from being clubbed and skinned like the other animals was the cavemen's discovery that cats had a special knack for keeping rats out of the caves.  

It was not long before cats were sauntering on their silent pads into the story books.  According to an Arabian legend, there were no cats at first on the passenger manifest of Noah's Ark  The mice couple aboard  decided to multiply and Noah, fearful the unexpected extra cargo might make his ship not seaworthy, did not know what to do so he called on the lion to help.  The lion sneezed and, obligingly, two cats leapt from its nostrils.  The mice aboard the Ark were soon being kept in line.

Watch this space for more cat stories!

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