II. The Stone Age Bonk Empire
Human beings emerged because evolution got bored and decided to see what would happen if anxiety learned how to throw rocks under the distant managerial gaze of prehistoric cat destiny.
The first people were hairy, confused, and weirdly committed to the idea that every problem had a rock solution, which the cats found charming in the way modern executives find interns who color-code spreadsheets for fun.
If dinner ran away, they threw a rock.
If a rival tribe got mouthy, they threw a rock.
If the moon looked arrogant, they absolutely considered throwing a rock.
One legend tells of Grug, the first true hero, who invented the wheel after sitting on a round stone and yelling for six straight hours while an extremely smug cave cat watched him reinvent rolling like it had not been nudging pebbles around for years.
Another legend tells of Mogga, who discovered fire by arguing with lightning and accidentally winning, though the cats quickly rebranded it as "the new superior nap-adjacent warmth platform."
The tribe celebrated by roasting mammoth, dancing badly, and immediately nearly burning down their entire cave.
Every cave wall became humanity's first social media feed, full of buffalo fan art, handprints, one guy who kept drawing butts, and at least three heroic portraits of giant mystical cats that future archaeologists would very unfairly describe as "possibly decorative."
Archaeologists call this "evidence of symbolic cognition," but really it was prehistoric shitposting plus early cat propaganda.