It is said that Native Americans considered the stones of the earth to be the spine of the earth, which held it together and that extracting rocks from the earth was the equivalent to removing the earth's spine.  It is also said that the use of mining and cultivation by the Europeans was regarded in horror by the indigenous as they saw it as the defilement of the Sacred Mother Earth.  As is often the case such ideas have a perennial appeal. This wisdom too was understood by the Ancient Greeks. As is so often the case these ideas were however forgotten in the occident, which came to valued monetization above all else, a far cry from an antiquity which equated excessive accumulation of wealth with greed, hubris, and folly.

In Ancient Greek tradition Deucalion was the son of the creator of humanity Prometheus 'forethought.'  Deucalion's wife Pyrrha was the daughter of Prometheus' brother Epimethius 'after thought,'  and she was the daughter of Pandora who had been fashioned by Prometheus.

Paralleling the story of Noah, the sky god upset with humanity and it's baseness inundated the world with a great flood of water.  The only ones judged worthy of survival due to their observance of the divine, lack of hubris and innocence, were the consorts Deucalion and Pyrrha.  The worthy couple were saved by floating on the waters in a boat.  They then consulted an Oracle as to what they should do afterward.  The Oracle instructed them to cast over their shoulder a bone of their "Great Mother."  They would discover that their "Great Mother" referred to by the Oracle was the Earth and her bones were the stones scattered over the surface of the Earth.  Obediently following the will of their Goddess the couple cast the stones behind their shoulders.  Those cast by Deucalion turned into the men, and those by Pyrrha into women.