Wei Juxian stated that Pan-gu-shi story of Qin-Han time periods had derived from the story of ZhongLi (Chong-li ?aka ZhuYong, the grandson of Gao Yang) in Western Zhou Dynasty, 1000 years earlier than Pangu (unconfirmed). Other popular Chinese creation myths say humans were created later either by the goddessNuwa or by the Jade Emperor.
Professor Qin Naichang, head of the Guangxi Institute for Nationality Studies proposes the myth originated in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Laibin city (in the center of the Pearl River Valley). He believes that there are older stories of Pangu from this region and that they originally involved two people:
A brother and his sister became the only survivors of the prehistoric Deluge by crouching in a gourd that floated on water. The two got married afterwards, and a mass of flesh in the shape of a whetstone was born. They chopped it and the pieces turned into large crowds of people, who began to reproduce again. The couple were named 'Pan' and 'Gou' in the Zhuang ethnic language, which stand for whetstone and gourd respectively.
He suggests China has no myth about the creation of the universe and that the Chinese mythology of PanGu had came from India, Egypt or Babylon. Apparantly, this story mingled in with the origin stories of other cultures, eventually changing into the later narrative more popular today:
In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except formless chaos, but then this chaos began to coalesce into a cosmic egg. Within this, the perfectly opposed principles of yin and yang became balanced and Pangu, the first living thing, emerged from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive hairy giant clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang, creating the Earth and the sky by forcing them apart. The task took eighteen thousand years. Each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most fortunate beasts, namely the Dragon, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Turtle. After eighteen thousand years had elapsed, Pangu died. His body became the mountains of the world; his blood, sweat, and tears the oceans and rivers; his eyes the sun and moon; his breath the wind; his voice thunder; his hair forests; and the fleas on his body human beings
