It was my brother who made me think about it. "Have you ever noticed,” he said, “that rubbing oil on your baby after giving her a bath is like basting a chicken?"

I hadn't, but now I do. It makes perfect sense, because we evolved from chickens.

Humankind didn't evolve from fish. Fish didn't crawl onto land, grow hair and turn into monkeys. And the monkeys didn't jump out of trees clutching their bananas and declaring that you know what? I've decided to be a human for a day and see how it pans out.

There was no panning out. The pans stayed locked up in the cupboards of Hell's Kitchen and the cooks fried fish and spit-roasted monkeys over a fire fuelled with trees that the monkeys found themselves swinging around and not in.

It was the chicken who won the evolutionary race, not the fish and not the monkey. It was the chicken who told the tortoise that slow and steady doesn't always win; sometimes running around seemingly headless will do the job just as well.

Yes, it was the chicken that came in first and it only came to the realisation of the humans when they were having their eggs for breakfast and pondered upon where it all started.

These are the ungainly birds that are only marginally better than the pigeons and sea-gulls which flew millennia later over car parks and the puzzled humans lying on the beaches wondering why the fish hadn't crawled out and grown hair.

It stands to reason. Leave us in the cold and our hairless skin reverts to looking like that of a defeathered chicken. Watch how we try to regain our balance as we slip on a watery surface by flapping our arms in futility like a chicken flailing its wings attempting flight. And listen as we goad each other on further down the evolutionary processes; you refuse to evolve? To go forwards. To try something different. To be adventurous. You don't want to? You must be chicken.

We may as well be. "Have you ever noticed," said one T-rex to another, "That humans taste like chicken?"