Читать книгу The Power of Plagues - Irwin W. Sherman - Страница 18

Figure 2.1 Hollywood’s view of Australopithecus as seen in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Turner Entertainment Co. Licensed by Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved, Alamy Stock Photo

In Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Richard Strauss’s music (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) provides a haunting and frightening background to the sequence of scenes that represent the dawn of humanity. The sun rises on a barren African savannah. A band of squat, hairy ape-men appear; they eat grass. Though herds of tapirs graze close by, the ape-men ignore them, since the means and the tools necessary to attack or kill the tapirs have not yet been developed. These ape-men are vegetarians who forage for roots and edible plants. On the dawn of the second day, the ape-men are seen huddled around a water hole; the landscape is littered with bones. One, the leader of the group, picks up a bone, smashes the skeleton of an antelope, and then the bone is used to kill a tapir (Fig. 2.1). Shortly thereafter, the raw pieces of tapir flesh are eaten and shared by other hairy apelike creatures, members of the clan. At the dawn of the third day, the meat-eating, tool-using man-apes drive off a neighboring band of apelike creatures. Bone tools used for killing animal prey are now used to threaten and drive off rival tribes. In slow motion, accompanied by the slowly building tones of Strauss’s music, the leader of the man-apes flings his weapon, a fragmented piece of bone, into the air. It spins upward, twisting and turning, end over end. There is a jump cut of 4 million years into the future, and the bone dissolves into a white, orbiting space satellite. Kubrick’s science fiction film has been described as a countdown to tomorrow, a visual masterpiece and a compelling drama of human evolution. Absent from the film is an examination of how the enlightened roving bands of early apelike humans settled down and become increasingly disease-ridden. Here is that part of the story.