In Grand Valley Dani origin tradition the Nakmatugi are the primordial beings of the beginning, the ancestral stock from which present-day humanity descends. Narratives collected in the Baliem Valley place their emergence in the ancestral time before the establishment of gardens, warfare and the elaborate funerary order that structures Dani life. Versions recorded from different informants diverge widely in detail, and the Nakmatugi are remembered less as sharply individuated persons than as the primordial race of the first days. Dani religious attention rests far more on the ghosts of the recent dead than on any developed cosmogonic pantheon, and observers have consistently remarked on the slightness of Dani cosmological speculation.