What old she know about caring for little savage prehistoric apes?

The far bigger prehistoric apes must have found it much harder and therefore have been much more terrestrial.

Of lesser importance are the appearance of the monolith, the age of HAL, and the novel giving names to various spacecraft, prehistoric apes, and HAL's inventor.

Donald, in the 1990 book Origins of the Modern Mind as well as later papers, proposed an evolutionary model of the mind, from a functionary perspective, from its origins in prehistoric apes to the modern human being.