Alien archaeology (with spoilers)

I've been watching the old BBC series, Quatermass and the Pit on BBC iPlayer recently, and enjoying it a lot. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend it (or the film version), especially if you're planning to read the rest of this post (spoilers ahoy!).

I was struck was how unexpectedly similar some of the underlying ideas, themes and major plot elements were to a very different Sci Fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Namely:

• Both involve the discovery and excavation of an ancient alien artifact: the Martian spacecraft buried under London in Quatermass, the lunar monolith in 2001.
• In both stories, the authorities try to keep the discovery a secret with cover stories. In Quatermass, the alien spacecraft is explained away as an unidentified German V weapon that had fallen on London in World War 2. In 2001, the moon base is quarantined on the pretext of an outbreak of some unidentified disease.
• In both cases, the aliens who left the artifact behind altered the minds of our ancient hominid ancestors, pushing them towards greater intelligence and putting them on to the path to being human.
• In both cases the seemingly inert alien artifact is activated by being exposed to a power source, leading to the climax of the story.
• The human propensity for violence and its origin hangs over both stories. The Quatermass Martians bequeath intelligence to the hominids, but also their own propensity for violence, which we are told, stems form the insect-like Martians' instinct carry out periodic eugenic purges of their hives, in order to exterminate the unfit. In 2001, the aliens are presented as inscrutable, rather than evil, but it's also clear that, along with the gift of intelligence, their intervention also gifted our ancestors with the weapons, and perhaps the desire, to kill one another.
• Quatemass and the Pit ends with a warning that the human race may destroy itself if it fails to curb the drive towards violence and weapon-making abilities that came, along with our intelligence from the aliens. This theme isn't made so explicit in the film version of 2001, (in the famous jump cut from bone club to orbiting satellite, it's never made clear that the first few spacecraft are orbiting weapons of mass destruction) but the novel is a lot less coy about the continuity of human violence.

At first sight, it seems as if Clarke might have been, perhaps unconsciously, influenced by this 1950s TV series. But, despite the striking similarities, it's probably not that simple. Quatermass and the Pit was first broadcast on the BBC in the winter of 1958-9, after Arthur C Clarke had moved permanently to Sri Lanka, and the film version didn't come out until 1967, (filming of 2001 had already started in 1965).

Also, the two elements (the discovery of an ancient alien artifact and aliens encountering ancient humans) had been explored in two of Arthur C Clarke's earlier short stories, The Sentinel (1951) and Encounter in the Dawn (1953), so it could even be that Nigel Kneale was influenced by Clarke's short stories when writing this Quatermass tale, rather than the other way round. Or maybe the parallels are just coincidence, but they've intriguing enough to be worth a bit more digging when I've got the time/inclination. Who knows what I might uncover...