Who Taught People To Count? - Alternative View

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Who Taught People To Count? - Alternative View
Who Taught People To Count? - Alternative View

Video: Who Taught People To Count? - Alternative View

Video: Who Taught People To Count? - Alternative View
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A tribe lives in the jungle of Brazil, which does not count at all

It is difficult to imagine a world without numbers that support all science and technology. But where did the ability to count come from? Scientists believed it was congenital. Vital. And almost embedded in the genes. It turned out that this is not the case.

Linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) studied the Piraha tribe who never counted anything. Indians in the number of 300 people live far from civilization in the wild jungles of the Amazon and speak their own language. And in it, surprisingly, there are no words that mean "one", "two" and so on. For the Indians, one or two is a few, and the rest is a lot. And they manage somehow.

“I think it is possible to teach them to count, using, for example, English,” says the head of the expedition, Professor Edward Gibson. “But the Indians don't need that. They shy away.

And who, after all, taught to count our distant ancestors? Not hidden by the impenetrable jungle? Riddle …