Two makings of the first people lie side by side on the record's one wired witness, a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth. The elder making is almost an accident. P'an Ku, a dwarfish figure "clothed in bearskin," "chiselled the universe out of Chaos" and laboured eighteen thousand years; and when, his work ended, "he died that his works might live", his breath became the wind and his blood the rivers, while "the insects creeping over his body human beings" — mankind arriving as the least of a giant's remains, "a lowlier origin" than even "the tears of" an Egyptian god.

The younger making is deliberate. Under the heading "Nü Kua Shih, the Repairer of the Heavens", the same witness names Nü Kua — a serpent-bodied deity with the "body of a serpent and head of an ox" — as "the creator of human beings when the earth first emerged from Chaos". One account has her "moulded yellow earth and made man"; another that she "moulded the first man (or the first human beings) out of clay". Here is a creator who stoops and works the ground with her hands, shaping people from wet earth as a potter shapes a bowl — the motif in its plainest form, a maker and a made thing.

The compiler is candid that this shape is late and slight even at home: Nü Kua is elsewhere only the mender of a broken sky, and the personal creator surfaces in "one or two other explanations" beside the impersonal metaphysics the Chinese mind preferred. Beyond her the shelf reaches far but reads little. Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this address its number, files the same deed among Greek, Aztec, and African peoples, and among the Maori — but those cards wait unread. Does the first human arrive as a maker's purpose, or as what is left over when a maker is done?