Laird Scranton at CPAK 2008. The Dogon, an outwardly primitive African tribe from modern-day Mali, preserve a detailed cosmology in ancient form, cast in the themes, symbols and storylines of the classic world mythologies, and couched in the clearest of modern terms, yet expressed using ancient Egyptian words. The cosmology is founded on an aligned ritual shrine that takes the same form and evokes the same symbolism as a Buddhist stupa, and culminates in a religious tradition that expresses itself through many of the signature rituals of Judaism, such as the wearing of skull caps and prayer shawls, the practice of circumcision, and the celebration of a Jubilee year. This presentation is an introduction to a pivotal culture that appears to stand at the very crossroads of ancient knowledge.
About 8 years ago when I lived in Bradford, Yorkshire UK, I came across a Dinka (from South Sudan as it is now called) who had taught physics in a secondary school, having been stranded in Bradford because the Sudan govt. would not fund him to study electronics and would not let him return home. (He was a Christian and not popular with the Muslim govt.) He told me that the more he found out about ancient Egyptian beliefs, the more that he saw similarities with Dinka beliefs. The Dinka are a pastoral nomadic cattle herding people of the kind who would have roamed the Sahara before it became desert, that is, in pre-Dynastic Egyptian times. I do not know if their traditions state that they originate in the Sahara, but they are regarded as a Nilotic people. I have forgotten his surname, and I have lost contact with him, having moved to another town (Harrogate). His first name was Mark. He then began advising the new government of South Sudan on telecoms, including the installation of satellite ground stations. I have told Carmen Boulter about this in an email, and suggested that more can be found out if one goes to Sudan. I have only been in Khartoum myself. I have also been very briefly in Egypt, on Crete fairly often and on the island of Thera, also known as Santorini, where the very large caldera that resulted from that volcanic explosion is still very visible.
I was pleased to see that the Dogon seem to be supporting a version of torsion physics (Jaeger). You may be interested to know that if you go to the MacTutor website, which has nothing to do with fast foods and everything to do with the history of mathematics, being hosted at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, you will find that J. Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin), James Clark Maxwell and a friend and colleague of theirs believed that atomic particles were vortices. The friend worked on the relevant mathematics. Somehow this information seems to have got lost in conventional histories of western science.