Stanley Kubrick's ambitious film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered on April 2, 1968. Four years in the making, "2001" drew from the most optimistic predictions of futurists to map out a then-believable scenario of 21st-century space travel. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote various versions of the story under Kubrick's guidance, and the film was pieced together from their collaborative effort.
The film begins 4 million years in the past. A troop of prehuman man-apes is barely surviving on the African plain as a drought threatens their existence.
One day, an unexplained black monolith appears. The influence of the monolith causes one of the apes to begin using bones as weapons. The apes kill animals for food, and later bludgeon the leader of an enemy tribe: the first murder.
It is not known when the ancestors of humans first used tools and weapons. Around the time frame of the film, a species of pre-human called Australopithecus lived in Africa. The oldest known stone tools date back to 2.6 million years ago.
In one of the most famous transitions in film history, a camera shot of a bone tumbling through the air cuts to a shot of an orbiting spacecraft, a gap of 4 million years between film frames.
The kinds of spacecraft depicted in "2001" were imagined by engineers in the years following World War II. This 1953 painting by Chesley Bonestell features a ring-shaped, rotating space station, a winged shuttle plane, and lunar landing vehicles under construction.