A colleague recently pointed me to a Mishnaic source for evolution, Parah 3:5.
לֹא מָצְאוּ מִשֶּׁבַע, עוֹשִׂין מִשֵּׁשׁ, מֵחָמֵשׁ, מֵאַרְבַּע, מִשָּׁלשׁ, מִשְּׁתַּיִם וּמֵאֶחָת. וּמִי עֲשָׂאָם. הָרִאשׁוֹנָה עָשָׂה משֶׁה, וְהַשְּׁנִיָּה עָשָׂה עֶזְרָא, וְחָמֵשׁ, מֵעֶזְרָא וָאֵילָךְ, דִּבְרֵי רַבִּי מֵאִיר. וַחֲכָמִים אוֹמְרִים, שֶׁבַע מֵעֶזְרָא וָאֵילָךְ. וּמִי עֲשָׂאָן. שִׁמְעוֹן הַצַּדִּיק וְיוֹחָנָן כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל עָשׂוּ שְׁתַּיִם שְׁתַּיִם, אֶלְיְהוֹעֵינַי בֶּן הַקּוֹף וַחֲנַמְאֵל הַמִּצְרִי וְיִשְׁמָעֵאל בֶּן פִּיאָבִי עָשׂוּ אַחַת אֶחָת:
If they did not find the residue of the ashes of the seven [red cows] they performed the sprinkling with those of six, of five, of four, of three, of two or of one. And who prepared these? Moses prepared the first, Ezra prepared the second, and five were prepared from the time of Ezra, the words of Rabbi Meir. But the sages say: seven from the time of Ezra. And who prepared them? Shimon the Just and Yohanan the high priest prepared two; Elihoenai the son of Ha-Kof and Hanamel the Egyptian and Ishmael the son of Piabi prepared one each.
Who is Elyehoeinai ben Hakof? And would we really say that he is the son of a monkey?
I tried looking for him. At Sefaria’s site (just as at mivami), they underline and hyperlink all the personalities they know about (hover over the name to see this), but not this Elyeho’einai.
I was able to find him in Hebrew Wikipedia. Generally, I don’t trust Wikipedia, but it is a good for Computer Science topics, in English, and Talmudic Biography (in Hebrew. The English Wikipedia for Talmudic Biography is often abysmal, with egregious errors, but Hebrew-speakers do a much better job. And it is a good first stop in research.
One important thing we find out about this Elyehoeinai ben Hakof is that his name is spelled differently. They note:
לפי כתב יד קאופמן שמו הוא "אֶלְיוֹעֵינַיִי בֶן הַקָּיָיף".
According to the Kaufmann manuscript, his name is Elyo’einai ben haKayyaf. They also suggest that he is the son of the Kohen Gadol, Yosef Kayafa (or Yosef ben Kayafa). According to the Christian Bible, this person (Caiaphas) was the Kohen Gadol in the time of Jesus. There are a lot of instances of “son-of” at play, so we could just as well establish him as a brother of Yosef ben Kayafa. Kayafa might be a profession, such as basket-maker.
Here is the Kaufmann manuscript of that Mishnah:
Thus, the heh drops off from his name.
The same can be seem in Rav Aharon Hyman’s Toledot Tannaim vaAmoraim.
He notes the change to from ben haKof to ben haKayyaf, though not the extra or dropped heh.
Sometimes, such changes in names make it difficult to search for the person. Once one letter mismatches, the entire search string is assumed to not match. Luckily, there are a group of what are called fuzzy string matching algorithms, where a good-enough match will work. We need to allow for insertion, deletion or substitution of a letter and determine the proximity of the search and target string. I wrote about one such metric, the Levenshtein edit distance, in my inaugural post.