Build a movie plot around this: How long has the artifact been buried? Four million years
To Richard Strauss' tone poem "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the title sequence shows the sun rising behind the Earth, which is behind the moon.The Dawn of ManIn a sere African landscape, a group of ape-like hominids and some tapirs compete for the meagre green plants. A leopard attacks an ape. While one group of apes is drinking at a waterhole, another group approaches; the two groups scream at each other and one party is driven off. At night the apes huddle in fear among the rocks. In the morning a tall, thin, rectangular black monolith stands among the rocks. The apes are excited but touch the object and calm down. (Soundtrack: Gyorgy Ligeti's "Requiem.")An ape (Daniel Richter) lifts a femur bone from a skeletal pile and realizes it makes a fine weapon. (Soundtrack: "Thus Spake Zarathustra" again.) The ape realizes that it can destroy other bones with the club. Three turning points in evolution happen simultaneously: proto-humans learn to kill with weapons, to hunt using weapons and eat meat, and to walk upright. Club-carrying apes approach the group that drove them away from their waterhole. The club-carriers bludgeon the other group's alpha male to death and chase off the rest. The victorious alpha male throws his club and it spins into the air.TMA-1, or the Monolith on the Moon(No title card introduces this section of the film)The spinning bone segues to spaceships above Earth. A Pan-Am space shuttle approaches a large spinning space station, its revolutions mirroring those of the ape's spinning bone. As a single passenger dozes in his seat, a flight attendant with Velcro shoes recovers his floating pen. The shuttle pilots carefully match rotation and steer the shuttle into the station's central docking bay. (Soundtrack: Johann Strauss' Blue Danube waltz.)Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) meets an old friend in the arrivals lounge. They go through a voiceprint security check in which Floyd identifies his destination: the moon. The men chat; Dr. Floyd has a connecting flight in one hour. Floyd calls home...