Dogon Country (Bandiagara Escarpment)

The Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff running roughly 150 kilometres through central Mali, has been home to the Dogon people since at least the 14th–16th centuries CE, when they settled the area, building villages on and below the cliff face and, in some cases, reusing the cliffside dwellings of the earlier Tellem people who preceded them. Dogon villages, religious shrines, and the distinctive granaries with conical thatched roofs that dot the escarpment were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989 for both their cultural and architectural significance.

In 1976, the writer Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery, drawing on research by French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen conducted among the Dogon from the 1930s to 1950s, which described Dogon cosmological traditions referencing "Po Tolo," a companion to the star Sirius said to be small, heavy, and to orbit Sirius — details that closely match Sirius B, a white dwarf star invisible to the naked eye and only photographed for the first time in 1970. Temple argued this represented genuine ancient astronomical knowledge transmitted, he speculated, through contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation. Subsequent anthropological investigation, notably by Walter van Beek in the 1990s, found that Dogon informants in the 1990s did not share this specific Sirius B knowledge and raised serious questions about whether Griaule's original informants had instead absorbed information from earlier 20th-century European visitors — including, potentially, a French astronomer who had visited the region — and reflected it back in conversations with Griaule, a dynamic some anthropologists have linked to broader methodological concerns about leading questions in Griaule's fieldwork.