A week ago, I was listening to a BBC radio broadcast, as I usually do when tucked up in bed. It helps put me to sleep. The program that was airing at the time was about science and discovery. The topic was the Dogon tribe in Africa.

I thought it was going to be the usual stuff that the BBC is always broadcasting about Africa in the realm of science and discoveries; a new wind-up radio that works without batteries, a cheap, fuel efficient car that could be very effective in Africa, a new, cheap, more effective medicine for malaria, and the like.

What I heard, however, shocked the daylights out of me.

It so happens that the Dogon tribe has prior knowledge of the existence of superdense matter, a new, and largely unknown phenomenon even by the latest western scientific standards. The branch of science that engages in such esoteric pursuits is called super science. Superdense matter is matter that is so compacted that it can have the size of a tennis ball, but will weigh as much as our entire planet. This matter doesn't exist anywhere near our solar system, nor does it in the nearer galaxies, or else the gravitational pull that the matter creates around it would suck us into it.

Knowledge that this matter exists was only gained lately by study of the skies, of black holes to be more specific, using the latest in telescopic technology, and the latest scientific knowhow.

So how could a spear wielding, pierced ear, thatched hut inhabiting group of tribesmen have knowledge of such a phenomenon?

Towards the end of the program, they inserted the explanation of laser wielding aliens into the argument, and then, suddenly, I realised something that has escaped me on all the other occasions that they have put forward this explanation to explain things that are found in the hands of black people, but are considered too complex to be made by them, which I actually half believed, including the Egyptian pyramids, the equally precise pyramids of south America, the stones that could not possibly have been cut by beings using simple, primitive tools.

The implicit message is this that knowledge of such complex processes and phenomenon can only be attained by thinking, fully developed human beings. Since Africans are also human beings, the implicit message is that they are not mature enough as humans to be capable of such feats, otherwise, if the BBC doesn't think this way, then the obvious explanation they would have given of the Dogon tribe phenomenon would be that they are a product of a lost civilization, a civilization that was so advanced that it internalised complex knowledge into the very genetic makeup of the people.

In this case, it would be impossible to push in another common explanation that pops up now and then, that white people lived in these regions, for example the Zimbabwe ruins, because the Dogon tribe's feat is actually too advanced to be found anywhere on this planet. We are no longer dealing with stone constructions which can easily, and convincingly be associated with particular ethnic standards. No group has such complex knowledge internalised in their cultural framework to give as an example.

Try to beat this.

You will realise the dimensions of this feat if you asked how many of us today, living in this civilization, would know the answer to simple questions like: what are the mechanics of a transistor radio, an electric motor, let alone what matter the planet Saturn consists of? And yet here we have an African tribe with knowledge so complex, so distant in the past, and yet still alive in the members thousands of years later. This civilization actualised a feat no society today is even close to emulating.

Here is the fallacy.

Let us take the present situation as the way things are. Let us imagine that the BBC and the like are right. Then we can go on and imagine civilised aliens landing on this planet thousands of years ago.

They are intelligent, they are sophisticated, they can travel (they came all this way from their planet, and left advanced knowledge all over our planet, so there is no reason to believe that they were stranded in one part of our planet). They manage to somehow communicate on a very high level with any tribe they come in contact with, otherwise it would be impossible to relay such complex knowledge to the natives. Now here is the vital question: why would they give such advanced knowledge to groups that are less advanced? Wouldn't they, with all the capacities they have, see the obvious? Wouldn't they give higher forms of knowledge to those who can understand and appreciate them? Is it not logical to conclude, by using the very yardstick the BBC so readily applies to such matters, that, since they didn't come to Europe, they didn't see forms of humankind worthy of their attention in this homeland of more advanced forms of humanity?