The ants, conversely, could execute extraordinarily fiddly tasks, and they constructed the most intricate architecture both above ground and beneath it. But they lacked flair and a certain richness of thought. When a gathering of ants reached critical mass they exhibited a collective intelligence that was literal and unerring, much like a computer program. Guided by these programs, which developed over extended periods of time, ant colonies built city after labyrinthine city. Their society operated like a vast, precisely engineered piece of machinery, but separate an ant cog from that machine and you’d find that the individual’s thought processes were disappointingly shallow and pedestrian. This was the ants’ downfall, for the sort of creative thinking required to progress civilisation is the province of individuals – individuals like our Newton and Einstein, for example. The very nature of collective intelligence, its intrinsic principle of redundancy, is antithetical to the production of advanced thought; 100 million of us humans, though we might rack our brains as hard as we can, would still not come up with the three laws of motion or the theory of relativity.

In the ordinary run of things, therefore, neither ant society nor dinosaur society could have continued to evolve. As with countless such examples before and since, the flames of intelligence that had flared into life within these two species should have fizzled out in the waters of time, a couple of ephemeral bright sparks in the long night of Earth’s history.

But then a curious thing happened.

1

The First Encounter

It was an ordinary day in the Late Cretaceous. It is impossible to determine the exact date, but it was truly an ordinary day, and Earth was at peace.

Let us examine the shape of the world that day. At that time, the profiles and positions of the continents differed radically from their current forms. Antarctica and Australia made up a single landmass greater in size than either continent today, India was a large island in the Tethys Sea, and Europe and Asia were two separate landmasses. Dinosaurs were found predominantly on two supercontinents. The first, Gondwana, had been Earth’s only continuous landmass several billion years earlier. It had since broken up, and its area was greatly reduced, but it was still as big as present-day Africa and South America combined. The second, Laurasia, had split from Gondwana and would later come to form what we now know as North America.

That day, every creature on every continent was occupied with the business of survival. In that uncivilised world, they knew not where they’d come from and cared not where they were headed. When the Cretaceous sun was directly overhead and the shadows cast by the leaves of the cycads were at their smallest, their sole concern was where they were going to get lunch.