RS VIII Dogon +

Eli’s first baseball glove, which I picked out for him from a Big 5, was too large and heavy. He used a smaller glove that his uncle bought him. After one season he grew into the larger glove. But since he became a catcher his uncle bought him a catchers mitt. I used to warm him up before games and we used the large glove and the catchers mitt. I enjoyed that very much.

From Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan, published by Random House, Inc. in 1974, beginning page 69:

“With one apparent exception, there are no stories sufficiently detailed to dispose of other explanations and sufficiently accurate to portray correctly modern physics or astronomy to a prescientific or pretechnical people. The one exception is the remarkable mythology surrounding the star Sirius that is held by the Dogon people of the Republic of Mali.

The most striking aspects of Dogon astronomy have been recounted by Marcel Griaule … while there is no reason to doubt Griaule’s account, it is important to note that there is no earlier Western record of the remarkable Dogon folk beliefs …

In contrast to almost all prescientific societies, the Dogon hold that the planets as well as the earth rotate about their axes and revolve about the Sun … They hold that Jupiter has four satellites and that Saturn is encircled by a ring. … the Dogon are said to depict the planets moving correctly in elliptical, not circular orbits.

More striking still is the Dogon belief about Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. They contend that it has a dark and invisible companion star which orbits Sirius once every fifty years. They state that the companion star is very small and very heavy, made of a special metal called “Sagala” which is not found on earth.

The remarkable fact is that the invisible star, Sirius A, does have an extraordinary dark companion, Sirius B, which orbits it in an elliptical orbit once each 50.04 years. Sirius B is the first example of a white dwarf discovered by modern astrophysics.”

Sagan then goes on to speculate how the Dogon came about having this knowledge. He states that Bessel, an astronomer, in 1844 deduced a dark companion for Sirius in a 50 year orbit due to a 50 year wobble in the sinusoidal motion of Sirius A. Sirius B was later observed and the observation was confirmed in 1915. Identifying Sirius B as very heavy was not proposed until the mid 1930’s and at that it was met with considerable skepticism. In an attempt to rationalize this remarkable Dogon knowledge he speculates that Griaule may have been aware of this discovery and that may have influenced his research.

To my mind, this seems an unlikely mistake for a seasoned cultural anthropologist. Furthermore, in the late 1960’s Dieterlen was interviewed for a television show and she stated that she has seen carving estimated to be 400 years old that depict the Sirius myth. Sagan’s examination of the Dogon myth was limited to their astronomical observations from a third hand source, Temple, and apparently he never examined the original or second hand source from Griaule. If one speculates the myths were actually derived from their contact with the Nummo, it would stand to reason that they might have other unique, detailed knowledge.

Ironsmiths hold a special status in Dogon society. And, until recently, they were required to make an annual pilgrimage to Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana. Lake Bosumtwi is considered a sacred place and the location where the first ironsmith initiate learned ironsmithing from the Nummo. The lake is considered equally sacred by other groups including the Bambara and the Maliniki tribes who, according to the Dogon, originated with them from the same group.

The Dogon knew, in the 1940’s, that Lake Bosumtwi was formed by a meteor impact and they described it in great detail including the direction and angle of entry of the meteor. Modern geologists, however, did not even seriously speculate that the lake was formed by a meteor impact until 1979 largely because it is situated in a dense jungle forest that limited access to the lake. (see http://omzg.sscc.ru/impact/ab33.html ). The debate went back and forth for years as to whether or not the lake was formed by an impact until recent evidence positively confirmed its meteor origins dated to 1.07 million years ago.