Chapter:

An ancient, prematurely uplifted society of humans seeds the world for the first time. They also meet their end here, leaving behind surviving wild species.

1. The First Seeding

An old man is alone on a vast ship except for his cats and other animals. He seeks a sanctuary for them, unable to return to Earth. Just as the old man was losing hope, against almost impossible odds, he finds the lost planet terraformed by humans thousands of years ago. It is green and fertile, a beacon of hope in a barren void. This is how cats, sparrows, mice and rabbits inherit the planet. 

2. The Second Seeding 

When this world was terraformed thousands of years ago, the climate was artificially cooled. It was intended to have lasting effects, but after 111,000 years the effects were completely gone. This meant that the global temperature had risen by 6 °C. This caused the equator to turn into a dead zone, as no Earth life had been introduced to the planet that could withstand temperatures regularly above 45 °C, and sometimes much higher. At the landing site of the cats, desert is encroaching with droughts being the normal state of the weather. Steppe and savannah are the two most common habitat types that are not desert. The Northern polar continent has lost it's ice sheet and is now covered with spruce and grassy tundra. This is the current natural state of the planet's climate and it will remain this way for the foreseeable future.

3. 100,000 Yh Introduction
4. 100,000 Yh Landing Site Zone
5. 100,000 Yh West Catland
6. 100,000 Yh West Catland Mountains
7. 100,000 Yh South West Catland
8. 100,000 Yh South Central Catland
9. 100,000 Yh East Catland
10. 100,000 Yh Polarcardiva
11. 100,000 Yh Soloa
12. 100,000 Yh Ocean and Freshwater Life

The temperature increase has been at a plateau for over 1 million years and life has had time to adapt to the new current conditions. Grasses spread further into areas that were once desert, as did a few other plants that evolved improved drought tolerance, binding the soil and retaining water on flood plains which are soaked rarely, but thoroughly. The equator is still barren in the lowlands but the mountains hold established ecosystems that include insects but lack vertebrates due to geographical isolation of these "islands" of habitat within the mountains.

Most notably, the Western and Eastern halves of Catland have separated. A narrow channel of sea sits between them, isolating populations from each half. Rafting events and crossings by swimming are feasible for some animals, but it's rare enough that separated East and West populations quickly diverged into their own unique variants.

13. 2 Myh Introduction
14. 2 Myh West Catland: Landing Site Zone
15. 2 Myh West Catland: "Strength In Numbers"
16. 2 Myh West Catland: Corpse Ecology
17. 2 Myh West Catland: Mountain Ecology
18. 2 Myh East Catland: Wetland Ecology
19. 2 Myh East Catland: "Kitten Can't Wait"
20. 2 Myh East Catland: "Coast Grassland Border"
21. 2 Myh Oceans
22. 2 Myh Polarcardiva

A short stop in the timeline covers a major ecological event that will determine things to come. A family of amphibious cats find themselves on a southern island of a new distant continent where cats have never set paw.

23. 9.5 Myh The Raft

For the past 9 million years the climate has been relatively stable. At this current time, more carbon is being produced by volcanic processes than is being absorbed by lifelforms, but the gap is closing as habitability increases due to existing biomes spreading and adapting to harsher, hotter conditions, creating more space for plant, lichenous, fungal and algal life that can sequester carbon, especially big, old trees, or desert crusts that may at times become buried by sandstorms, the carbon within them stored for as long as they remain buried. However, the situation is difficult for shellfish (mussels, cockles) due to higher ocean acidity than during the seeding years, so their influence as a carbon sink is diminishing as they experience their own mini-extinction event. But this doesn't spell doom for shellfish as a whole. More, it limits their distribution and prevalence throughout the oceans.

24. 10 Myh Sea Babies
25. 10 Myh Other Cardivan Padlcats