 In the story, the Kyontawa are the descendants of a highly advanced Asian civilization from Earth's forgotten history, which established a deep-space settlement on what is now Sheenyana's planet.Clearly, that high-tech civilization is no more and the Kyontawa's knowledge of it is limited to their religious mythology of "Bird Gods" who seeded their people from the sky.Their language (subtitled in the film) has similarities to Asian languages of Earth, particularly Japanese.