The Dogon family living in the Republic of Mali today is known all over the world. Dogoni, like the Bambara, have astonished the scientific world and ordinary people with precise astronomical knowledge that has been carefully transmitted and stored for hundreds of years!

The information that Dogoni kept was, from the outset, a representative of modern science perceived only as the old mythology of a wild tribe. But as time goes on, when technology development has allowed mankind to look deep into space, scientists were amazed at what they found out. It has turned out that Dogoni has been mastering the precise knowledge of astrophysics since ancient times (without using modern equipment). More precisely, they knew the structure of the galaxy, its spiral shape, even the description of all the planets of our solar system. Their knowledge of the satellites both Jupiter and distant stars Sirius was admirable.

It is noteworthy that Sirius, as the home of the gods, appears in the myths and legends of the Dogon tribe, as is the case in Egyptian references.

According to their legends, the gods descended from heaven and taught them various crafts and arts. They gave them extensive knowledge of the structure of the universe and then returned home. The astronomical knowledge of the Dogon priests still amazes ethnographers and supporters of paleoastronautics.

In the south of Mali, on the Bandiagara plateau, a French expedition led by anthropologists Marcelo Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, the Dogon tribe, appeared in 1931. Griaule and his colleagues studied this amazing tribe until 1952.

It was a wonder: While Dogoni lived in total isolation from the outside world, they passed from generation to generation for thousands of years ancient astronomical knowledge that at that time even modern science had just argued.

For example, the Big Bang theory, the emergence, expansion of the Universe or other theory, astronomers have been discussing to date.

But the Dogon priests in 1930 told travelers: “At the beginning of time, the almighty Amma, the supreme deity, was in a huge rotating egg with a small seed at its center. And when it grew up and burst, the universe was created. ”

But one of Dogon's most exciting discoveries is that the brightest star in the sky in the constellation Sirius, the Big Dog, is a four-body system!

Orbit constellation Sirius

They called the nearest body Po"This star consists of an incredibly heavy, dense metal so heavy that all earthly beings would not be able to lift it together," they told French ethnographers.

Po or Sirius B (stars with close companions are referred to by letters of the alphabet - A, B, C, D, etc.) astronomers discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also found it to be a white dwarf - a smoldering superstar star.

Recently, some astronomers have discovered that strange gravitational anomalies occur in Siria, so the presence of several stars can not be ruled out. The fascinating question remains, however, as Dogoni knew.

For the first time on the results of the French expedition and the knowledge of the Dogons about space, Eric Guerrier wrote in the book Essay on Dogon cosmogony: archa Nommo, and also the well-known writer Robert Temple in an amazing book The Secret of Siria.