本文源自大学科幻文学写作课上教授布置的一篇阅读提问，阅读的书籍是2001, A Space Odyssey。非正式的随笔写作。
The story presents the idea that humans are an alien experiment in genetic modification. This theory actually has real adherents who argue that the rise of Cro-magnon (modern) humans was far too sudden to have happened according to common evolutionary patterns. What do you think of this?
After reading the first two chapters of the book, it is clear that the author want to convey the idea that modern human’s intelligence does not come from natural evolution but from forced revelation from a higher being. The Moon-Watcher already did possess certain traits that gave him better chance of survival. Walking upright enabled his upper limbs to perform more elaborate tasks and being able to "look steadfastly at the Moon” indicated a possible development of his abstract thinking. But Moon-Watcher and his kind still lack basic social understanding. For example they left the corpse of dead to hyenas. The lack of burial ritual indicates there is still a long way of evolution ahead.
The sudden appearance of the New Rock changed everything. The whole tribe was attracted to the Rock and had no idea that “their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated” and those completed the task were rewarded with intense and “indescribable pleasure”. All the descriptions about the Rock suggest that it must be made from a highly-intelligent being.
The Moon-Watcher, after the contact with Rock, quickly started to use stone tools as weapon both to kill wild predators and to fight against nearby tribe. The book points out that “the tools they had been programmed to use were simple enough, yet they could change this world and make the man-apes its masters.”
After the first revelation on tools, all subsequent evolutions the physical change of the face that permits speech and more space of the brain, the improved dexterity on hands, the taming of fire, the appearance of language that allows the continuation of experience and knowledge, the development of villages and cities, philosophy and religion and etc. and finally the dawn of Homo Sapiens emerges. Without realizing it, the Moon-Watcher and his people were in a way modified by the New Rock.
Personally I intend not to believe that human beings are products of other intelligent lives unless there are concrete anthropological evidences showing that at a certain period, the rate of human evolution is exceedingly fast.
It is true that there are many unsolved mysteries on earth. Some of them are so unbelievable that one can almost conclude that they must be left by some intelligent extraterrestrial lives. But admitting the existence of them is no way suggesting that they have altered the course of human evolution. I can't help wonder if they really did that, what's the purpose?
I don't believe that a spaceship just came by Earth and randomly (yet right at the moment before there are signs that certain specie on this planet is about to develop consciousness and intelligence) decided to give it push. It is convenient for such a coincidence to happen even given the vastness of the universe. The book may simply want to provide another way of looking at the evolution of human being.
Also, there is no determining which is the turning point for an accelerated human evolution.
Another theory about the turning point is the taming of fire,
for fire
So does that mean if certain alien came by earth and taught human how to use fire, there will also be an unusual indication in the speed rate of our evolution? It just seems too random and unpredictable. Maybe just by pure luck the Moon-Watcher learned to use tools and to control fire without any other outside interventions.