A Chinese myth

They provide the raw material of evolution. The environment selects those few mutations that enhance survival, resulting in a series of slow transformations of one lifeform into another, the origin of new species.In the Mayan holy topic the Popol Vuh, the various forms of life are described as unsuccessful attempts by gods with a predilection for experiment to make people. Early tries were far off the mark, creating the lower animals; the penultimate attempt, a near miss, made the monkeys. In Chinese myth, human beings arose from the body lice of a god named P’an Ku. In the eighteenth century, de Buffon proposed that the Earth was much older than Scripture suggested, that the forms of life somehow changed slowly over the millennia, but that the apes were the forlorn descendants of people.