Math is overrated, anyway

An Amazon tribe called the Piraha apparently has no need for numbers in their language:

The idea that people have an innate mathematical ability has been questioned by a study of an Amazonian tribe that has no sense of number.

The ability of tribal adults of the Pirahã to conceptualise numbers is no better than that of infants or even some animals and their language, with only 300 speakers, has no word even to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number.

The team, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Pirahã tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Prof Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

The study, which appeared in the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, said Prof Gibson, who did the study with Michael Frank, Dr Evelina Fedorenko, and Prof Daniel Everett, of Illinois State University.

Fascinating.