Moon-Watcher picked up the shrivelled corpse, and dragged it after him as he bent under the low overhang of the cave. One of the mothers, defending the infant she could not properly feed, gave him an angry growl in return he lacked the energy even to cuff her for her presumption. The two babies were already whimpering for food, but became silent when Moon-Watcher snarled at them. He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness. When the first faint glow of dawn crept into the cave Moon-Watcher saw that his father had died in the night. It was always hungry, and now it was starving. In bad times the stream vanished completely, and the tribe lived in the shadow of thirst. About fifty of them occupied a group of caves overlooking a small, parched valley, which was divided by a sluggish stream fed from snows in the mountains two hundred miles to the north. The man-apes of the veldt were none of these things, and they were not flourishing indeed, they were already far down the road to racial extinction. In this barren and desiccated land only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

2001 a space odyssey intro