Hi Raoul

As the Fortean Times article makes clear the whole Dogon thing was dreamt up by people reading into Griaule's own tendentious work.

'Red Sirius' is a puzzler, I agree, but it's entirely possible for Sirius B to have lost a lot of mass and to have evolved quicker than Sirius A. The 'red' phase seen in ancient times would have been a brief bloating by the last burst of fusion in the last bit of regular star stuff before the white-dwarf blew it away - not much more mass than B has today, but enough to create a temporary envelope. Stars often go through several pulses of mass loss and bloating according to modelling of the Asymptotic Giant Branch. Kind of like novae but much slower. It's also possible that B's lost mass was ultimately dumped onto A - which didn't cause a nova because its a Main Sequence star.

The AGB lasts for such a brief time (<100,000 years) that only a few stars are seen in that stage - though there's a lot of dispute over that claim too.

Adam