Themis answers in a riddle: leave the temple, veil your heads, loosen the garments girt about you, and throw behind you the bones of your great mother. Pyrrha refuses at first, unwilling to offend her mother's ghost by scattering her bones, but Deucalion works out the oracle's true meaning: their great mother is the earth itself, and her bones are the stones lying on its surface. Turning away from the shrine and walking forward, the couple throw stones over their shoulders as instructed, and the stones begin to soften, take on rough human shape, and grow into people, those thrown by Deucalion becoming men and those thrown by Pyrrha becoming women.
Ovid frames the pair explicitly as the most righteous man and most scrupulously devout woman alive, the sole justification the gods find for sparing anyone at all, which gives the Greek version a moral logic close to that of other ancient Near Eastern flood stories even though its mechanics, a stone-born second humanity rather than descent from the survivors themselves, are distinctively Greek. Deucalion and Pyrrha's son Hellen is remembered in Greek tradition as the eponymous ancestor of the Hellenes, tying the flood story directly into the origin of the Greeks as a people.