Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

We’re getting close to home now. It’s been a long voyage to reach our timeline, half a billion years over multiple Earths. But the branch point of this particular Earth diverges from our own only around ten million years ago. It is almost modern. Great swathes of grassland are beating back the forests of the world; herds of grazing animals drift across them, practically familiar from nature documentaries. There are oreodonts like waddling hippo-sized pigs; elephant relatives (with long lower lips, functioning as a thumb alongside the grasping finger of their short trunk); camels, deer, hornless rhinos. Everything seems larger than life, ruminating bellies crammed with bales of tough, nourishment-poor grass.

And there are primates. If you could look back millions of years, you might see a troupe of cunning apes. These fall somewhere between the baboon and the bonobo, and are staking out a waterhole with what seems like optimistically predatory intent. They have no tools more dangerous than a stick to winkle out termites, but their gaze is intent on the elephant relatives. They hoot and bellow in a frenzy of furious noise, jabbering, leaping on a wretched herbivore’s back and off again, throwing faeces like the filthy beasts they are. Their victim, a young male, lashes at them with his trunk, bellowing angrily, trampling after them as they flee into the grass. So much for the hunting efforts of our might-have-been-ancestors.

What takes the elephant is a cat built like a bear. It’s armed with curved teeth that it uses to carve open the luckless herbivore’s flanks before applying these daggers like pitons—staking one haunch. Another two of its kin leap a moment later, tearing open thick grey hide. They work at hamstringing, climbing claw over claw up their prey’s side to bite at the back of its neck. Between them, they bring the lumbering pachyderm to its knees and hold it there until blood loss drops it, keeping out of reach of trunk and tusks. The primates look on cautiously, their work done.

The three cats cough and mutter at one another, spraying a little scent for emphasis. They begin to dismember the carcass, sitting on their haunches like bears, or perhaps huge and murderous hamsters. One frees a rib from the corpse and cracks the bone at an angle with her carnassials before using the sharp edge like a crude blade to flense away at the meat. They have thumbs, not as nimble as yours or mine but enough for tools of convenience.

There is a lot of meat on a dead elephant, more than even these monster cats can eat. However, they leave precious little on the bones for the vultures and hyenas that keep hungry watch. The cats grumble and cough at each other throughout. Teeth, claws and makeshift tools make short work of all that flesh.