[Jeanette X]

Originally Posted by kahljorn

so they talked to someone stupid and that's evidence that its all a sham?

They talked to a lot of people about it. Keep in mind that the fieldwork that was done that lead to all this in the first place was done in the thirties and forties, when anthropology was still a fairly young discipline. Methods and ethics weren't quite as stringent as they are now.

http://www.philipcoppens.com/dogonshame.html

Griaule claimed that about 15 per cent of the Dogon tribe possessed this secret knowledge, but Van Beek could find no trace of it in the decade he spent with the Dogon. Van Beek actually spoke to some of Griaule’s original informants; he noted that “though they do speak about sigu tolo [interpreted by Griaule as their name for Sirius itself], they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some, it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that, through a different position, appears as sigu tolo. All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule.” Van Beek states that this creates a major problem for Griaule’s claims
Although he was an anthropologist, Griaule was keenly interested in astronomy and had studied it in Paris. As James and Thorpe point out, he took star maps along with him on his field trips as a way of prompting his informants to divulge their knowledge of the stars. Griaule himself was aware of the discovery of Sirius B and in the 1920s – before he visited the Dogon – there were also unconfirmed sightings of Sirius C.
The Dogon were well aware of the brightest star in the sky but, as Van Beek learned, they do not call it sigu tolo, as Griaule claimed, but dana tolo. To quote James and Thorpe: “As for Sirius B, only Griaule’s informants had ever heard of it.” Was Griaule told by his informants what he wanted to believe; did he misinterpret the Dogon responses to his questions? Either way, the original purity of the Dogon-Sirius story is itself a myth as it is highly likely that Griaule contaminated their knowledge with his own.

Originally Posted by kahljorn

why are there pyrmaids found all over the world and if you plot them all on a map and draw a spiral around them like connect the dots that spiral has the exact same ratio as the golden ratio?

Pyramids are found all over the world because when you want to build a Big Fucking Thing, but you don't have steel and advanced engineering techniques, the easiest way to build your Big Fucking Thing is by starting with a large base and tapering that base to a point. In other words, a pyramid.

As for the golden ratio business, I'm willing to bet that they left some pyramids out. Also, if I were to pick some arbitrary sites around the world I could probably connect them to make spiral with the same ratio. That is, if I was any good at math, which I'm not.