Robin Bright
English science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, wrote a short story, ’Sentinel of Eternity’ (1951), about a monolith left by a highly technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization, which enhanced the brains of the animals that encountered it. Film director, Stanley Kubrick, collaborated with Clarke to produce a 1968 movie version of the story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which apes are depicted killing an animal resembling a pig from the Ypresian stage of the early Eocene epoch in Earth’s history (56-47.8 m.a.); Eohippus angustidens: ’dawn horse’. Although in the future the hippo-like creature would evolve into the horse, the theme of the enhanced brain of an animal becoming that of a killer is central to the plot of the author, whose alien intelligence is obviously a self-extrapolation, because the E. angustidens is a pig, which means that the apes are evolving into killers, as they develop human intellectual power, while the pigs will develop into ’long pig’, that is, human food in the sense of food being humans.
