Four worlds, and the real evidence so far

A different kind of evidence

Long before telescopes, people were already asking

Wondering what is up there isn't new. Across Africa, the night sky has long carried stories about where the stars came from, when to plant, and who might live beyond them. Among the Tswana, some held that the stars were the souls of people dead so long they had passed beyond being ancestor spirits. Here are three stories, each credited to the people who told it, and one with an honest warning attached.

The girl who made the Milky Way · /Xam San, South Africa

A girl of the Early Race, angry that her mother had given her too few of the roots she loved to eat, threw wood ashes from the fire up into the sky. The ashes spread out and became the Milky Way, glowing softly so that people would have a little light to find their way home at night. Then she threw the roots themselves, and they became the stars.

Told by the /Xam storyteller |han≠kass'o, who heard it from his mother, and recorded by Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town in 1878. The original notebooks are held in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection at the University of Cape Town.

The digging stars · Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa and Zulu, southern Africa

The small star cluster known elsewhere as the Pleiades is Selemela to the Sotho and Tswana and isiLimela to the Xhosa and Zulu, names usually translated as "the digging stars." Their return to the dawn sky told farmers it was time to break the ground before the rains. Xhosa men counted their years of manhood from the June morning when isiLimela first reappeared. The stars also showed the way: to travel west at night, the Sotho and Tswana said, keep the Southern Cross on your left and Selemela on your right.

Drawn from southern African star lore collected by the South African Astronomical Observatory and published by Royal Museums Greenwich.

The Dogon and Sirius: a story that grew in the telling · Mali

You may have read that the Dogon people of Mali knew, long before astronomers, that the bright star Sirius has a tiny invisible companion, taught to them by beings called the Nommo who came from a world near Sirius. The claim comes from the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked with the Dogon from the 1930s, and a 1976 book later turned it into a theory of alien contact. But when the anthropologist Walter van Beek and his team restudied the Dogon in the 1980s, they found no one who knew of Sirius having a companion. He concluded that much of the lore had grown out of Griaule's own questioning of a small circle of informants. Griaule's daughter, also an anthropologist, defended her father's work, and the debate continues, but the evidence for ancient Dogon knowledge of the companion star is weak.

Walter van Beek, "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule," Current Anthropology 32 (1991). A short overview is available from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. It's a useful reminder of why this guide separates what has been found from what has been claimed.

These are cultural narratives, shared here for their own value, not as scientific evidence.