Nabelan-kabelan, glossed roughly as 'our skin, your skin', names the Grand Valley Dani myth of mortality. In the beginning, the tradition holds, humankind might have shed and renewed its skin and so lived without dying, as snakes renew their skins; but the possibility was lost and death entered the world, bringing with it the mourning and the elaborate funerary ritual that death now demands. Recorded versions of the myth differ, some casting the loss as the outcome of a contest between a bird and a snake in which the snake's gift of renewal was forfeited. In the twentieth century the same phrase came to carry the expectation that the ancestors and everlasting life would one day return, an idea that fed later prophetic movements in the highlands.