To understand the Yir Yoront culture it is necessary t aware of a system of ideas which may be
called their totemic ideology. A fundamental belief of the aboriginal divided into two great
epochs: [1] a distant and sacred period at. beginning of the world when the earth was peopled by
mildly marvelous ancestral beings or culture heroes who are in a sense the forebears of the clans;
and [2] a period when the old was succeeded by a new order which includes the present.
Originally there was no anticipation of another era supplanting the present. The future would
simply be an eternal continuation and reproduction of the present which itself had remained
unchanged since the epochal revolution of ancestral times.