From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pigdog.org)
Date: Mon Sep 22 1997 - 16:56:33 MDT
danny writes:
> The dogon story is very popular, I've heard it in more than one place.
Yes, but popularity and truth don't really seem to have very
much correlation.
Earlier you asserted that knowledge of the white dwarf Sirius B
went back thousands of years among the Dogon. This is the part
of your claim that I take issue with. When was it discovered
that the Dogon had this knowledge? Who was the first non-Dogon
to publish about this knowledge, and when? Were the Dogons a
literate people or was knowledge of Sirius's pup transmitted in
an oral tradition? If it was transmitted in an oral tradition,
then what is the evidence that the knowledge is as old among
the Dogon as claimed?
These questions matter because Europeans discovered Sirius's
pup late in the 19th century, and at the time of discovery,
this would have been widely discussed by scientifically-curious
literate people worldwide, not just astronomers. Knowledge of
the white dwarf companion might have come to the Dogon at this
time, shortly after the discovery by the Europeans, and been
"rediscovered" among the Dogon by some cultural anthropologist
at few decades later.
I don't know whether the claim about the Dogon is true, but I
do know what sort of information I'd need to see a lot more of
before I'd take this claim at face value. Where do these
claims originate in the literature? is always a good start.
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pigdog.org ++ expectation foils perception -pcd
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