[Secret Agent Man]

good to know. i just can’t read clarke.

[Steely Tom]

The bone that the ape throws skyward and then flashes forward a hundred thousand years to an orbiting satellite... that satellite is an orbiting hydrogen bomb.

You have no clue that that's the case, watching the movie. You have to read the commentary, by Clark and Kubrick, to understand what they are doing there.

The idea is - more or less - "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

The bone used by the ancient apes turns into the super-high-tech orbiting nuke. Each a tool for accomplishing exactly the same thing, on a vastly different scale.