Research on an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu has shown that, despite having no formalized concept of Euclidean geometry, they still have an equivalent or greater understanding of the concepts than American and French schoolchildren.
The Mundurucu people’s responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words.
“The question is to what extent knowledge – in this case, of geometry – is dependent on language,” Dr Pica explained.
“There doesn’t seem to be a causal relation: you have a knowledge of geometry and it’s not because it’s expressed in the language.”
Geometry Skills are Innate, Amazon Tribe Study Suggests [BBC]
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