Posted on 08/21/2004 3:01:00 PM PDT by blam
Piaget had proved long ago that there are certain things, that if you don't learn them by a certain critical age, you lose them forever.
From a cultural perspective, this is tremendously interesting. I imagine that the people who live there will, by the age of ten or so, see and know just about everything they ever will. They've seen the edible and inedible plants. They've seen the forms of wildlife and their habitat. They've seen the patterns of the weather (rain and sun, parts of the Amazon rain daily, 140 inches or more per year)
So their capacity to learn new things probably drops almost to zero when they are a young adult.
Fascinating article. Thanks for the ping & link in #36!
I remember Gamow's book. Excellent. Another recent book is The Nothing That Is by Robert Kaplan, about what a revolutionary concept "zero" was.
Yeah. I bet if they were getting welfare checks, they'd learn to count real quick.
Perhaps these Amazonians are utilizing a "limb-based" mathmatics, instead of a digital one.
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