Dine tradition holds that the people who exist in this world today passed through a series of earlier, lower worlds before arriving at the present one. Most tellings count four such worlds beneath this one, often described in terms of color, ranging from a dark, insect-like first world through successive worlds of increasing light and complexity, each populated by beings whose conduct and conflicts eventually make that world unable to sustain them, forcing an escape upward into the next. Recurring causes for leaving a lower world include quarrels among the beings living there, moral failures, and floods that rise to force an ascent, themes comparative scholars have connected to the wider emergence-narrative pattern documented across many Indigenous traditions of the North American Southwest, while Dine accounts retain their own distinct sequence, figures, and vocabulary throughout.
First Man and First Woman are described as taking shape in the course of this passage between worlds, formed from ears of corn brought up through the successive worlds along with other sacred items, and their presence and conduct in each world shapes what the people carry forward into the next, including both the knowledge and the conflicts that will need to be resolved in the world still to come.