During the opening segment of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind's hominid predecessors are depicted waging battle over a watering hole with screams and flailing arms. The more fearsome -- or more numerous -- win rights to the water. This appears to be a ritual.
The hominids are not the apex predators, however, as leopard attacks show. The victors crouch together in the darkness of their cave dwellings, listening to leopard breaths, waiting for mortal threats to pass.
The hominids are "transformed" one day after the arrival of the mysterious singing monolith that is the physical representation of human evolution in Kubrick's film. After touching its lustrous black side, the previously herbivorous hominids discover, idly, the utility of dry bones.
The scene of the first murder is chilling, as the "monkeymen" scream and flail their arms as they had before but now they also swing femur and tibia as weapons. The startled, unarmed hominid tribe retreats -- either to study war themselves or to be destroyed by others.
And thus it is ever so.
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