The Popol Vuh frames the creation of humanity not as a single divine act but as a sequence of trials, each ending in disappointment for the gods, who wanted beings capable of naming and honoring them properly. The first beings, the animals of forest and field, could only squawk, chatter and roar, unable to form the gods' names, and were condemned to be eaten and hunted by those who eventually could speak. The gods next tried mud, shaping figures that could speak after a fashion but that had no strength, crumbled apart in water, and could not hold themselves together, an evident failure quickly abandoned.
The third attempt used wood, and its people looked more promising, able to speak and multiply and fill the earth, but they lacked hearts and minds, showed no memory of their makers and no gratitude toward them. The gods sent a great flood and resin rain against them, and their own dogs, turkeys, grinding stones and cooking pots, mistreated in daily use, rose up and attacked them for their neglect; some of the wood people who fled into the forest are said to have become the ancestors of modern monkeys, a species whose resemblance to humans without quite being human was read as a lingering trace of that failed creation.