I've never seen the 2004 film, but that's an absurd implication. Several frescoes from Akrotiri depict monkeys, and there's a fresco at Knossos that depicts these funky-looking green monkeys. Heracles is supposed to have been laughed at by the mischievous Cercopes, whose name means tail-men, and who were supposedly turned into monkeys by Zeus for being pains in the ass. The Pithecusae, or Ape Islands, off of Naples attests to Greek knowledge of apes, although the ancient geographers were at a loss to explain why they were called that, since no apes lived there. There were monkeys that lived in North Africa, now extinct in those parts, which played a prominent role in certain religious rituals--for example, they appear in Egyptian friezes rather frequently.