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The aim of this article is to examine the issues surrounding conceptual development in astronomy, and to shed greater light on the nature of children’s knowledge according to their cultural context. The article will first describe two competing theories concerning knowledge acquisition in astronomy: the mental model theory and the fragmented knowledge theory, as well as how each approach addresses the issue of cultural mediation. The relative importance of intuitions, cultural information, and explicit school learning in the acquisition of scientific knowledge about the shape of the Earth and the day/night cycle will be then discussed from a cross-cultural perspective. To this end, a detailed presentation of the work carried out on the African continent will illustrate some recent advances in this field of study. In particular, this article will demonstrate that, compared with children receiving convergent explanations in and out of school, children growing up in a cultural context that places little emphasis on scientific knowledge develop more hybrid explanations (mixing naïve and scientific elements) despite the scientific teaching they receive in school. Thus, the development of scientific knowledge seems to depend on the cultural context and the interactions between the different sources of knowledge accessible to the child.