An Amazon tribe converts the missionary

[Telarus]

An Amazon tribe converts the missionary

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20090412-ENTERTAIN-904120305

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Excellent!! 

[East Coast Hustle]

That's fucking awesome. I'm buying that book this weekend.

[Cramulus]

that IS awesome

the Piraha language is a really interesting artifact too:

The Pirahã language has a number of linguistic features that are claimed by some linguists to be unusual, though others have argued that they are found in other languages as well.

-Limitation of numerals to "one" or "two"
-There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns
-No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark
-Few specific kin terms; one word covers both "father" and "mother".
-Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music.

Being (correctly) concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist who was working with them, to teach them basic numeracy skills. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study, the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of learning the material, and discontinued the lessons. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even add 1 + 1.[6]

Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter-gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Third, since numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language entails a lack of counting. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.

[Requia ☣]

You know, this lends a lot of credit to the idea that the behaviorally modern human jump happened because of advances n language.

[Requia ☣]

Actually, I think this group *is* behaviorally pre modern.  I can't really find enough information on them to be sure, but no oral traditions, minimal art, lack of adapting other groups' tool kits.

Everything I can find fits the bill, which makes me wonder how they ended up like that in the Amazon, when there have never been any other human groups known do be like that in the rest of the new world.

[Kai]

I bet the Shapiro-Worf people eat this up.

[Requia ☣]

Shapiro-Worf?

[Nast]

Sapir-Whorf iirc.

[Verbal Mike]

Yes, Sapir-Whorf people really dig this shit. Last semester, we had to read a really kickass paper (Nevins et al, 2007) ripping Everett's later writings apart. (He didn't always make big claims about the Pirahã, and in earlier papers he didn't try to make them look unusual.) I've uploaded the paper, if you're interested:
http://ifile.it/i61dfuo

And an amusing excerpt from the introduction:

he presents this cultural explanation for morphosyntactic gaps as a challenge to foundational ideas in linguistics:
       "These constraints lead to the startling conclusion that Hockett's (1960) design features of human
       language, even more widely accepted among linguists than Chomsky's proposed universal
       grammar, must be revised. With respect to Chomsky's proposal, the conclusion is severe —
       some of the components of so-called core grammar are subject to cultural constraints, something
       that is predicted not to occur by the universal-grammar model." (CA 622)

   In this paper, we disagree with Everett on every one of these points. Indeed, the simplest
summary of the present article can be obtained by placing a negation in front of each claim summarized
above. Some of Pirahã's supposed "inexplicable gaps" (both linguistic and cultural) will be argued to
be illusory or non-existent. The remaining linguistic "gaps" will turn out to be (in all likelihood) real,
but shared with languages as diverse as German, Chinese, Hebrew, Wappo and Adyghe. Since these
are languages spoken within cultures that do not share the key properties of Pirahã culture as described
by Everett, no arguments for Everett's "startling" or "severe" conclusions will remain.

[Kai]

One of the things that struck me last night was,

are these people reproductively isolated? In other words, does their ecology keep them from breeding with other populations of people?

If so, they are in essence a different species, or what we think of as a biological species, ie a reproductively isolated population of individuals, either by ecology or genetics (sympatric), or by some geographic barrier (allopatric).

[BADGE OF HONOR]

Actually, I think this group *is* behaviorally pre modern.  I can't really find enough information on them to be sure, but no oral traditions, minimal art, lack of adapting other groups' tool kits.

Everything I can find fits the bill, which makes me wonder how they ended up like that in the Amazon, when there have never been any other human groups known do be like that in the rest of the new world.

It's pretty evident that early humans and even neanderthals had art, language, etc so calling these people "pre-modern" is a misnomer.  Call them instead a cultural mutation.

[Kai]

Actually, I think this group *is* behaviorally pre modern.  I can't really find enough information on them to be sure, but no oral traditions, minimal art, lack of adapting other groups' tool kits.

Everything I can find fits the bill, which makes me wonder how they ended up like that in the Amazon, when there have never been any other human groups known do be like that in the rest of the new world.

It's pretty evident that early humans and even neanderthals had art, language, etc so calling these people "pre-modern" is a misnomer.  Call them instead a cultural mutation.

heh, it brings to mind those walkingsticks that secondarily lost their wings at several points in the whole group, or other insects with vestigeal organs. If a selection force isn't acting acting in favor of a selection character because its somewhat unbeneficial (like the eyes of the ancestors of cave insects, for example, or the wings of the ancestors of beetles that settled upon wind blown rocky islands), that character will tend to be minimalized or lost. Perhaps social evolution can work in a similar manner, ie the things we see as basal or ansestoral characters (the biological term would be plesiotypys, generalized rather than unique characters) would actually just be what happens when these things were secondarily lost.

[Requia ☣]

Actually, I think this group *is* behaviorally pre modern.  I can't really find enough information on them to be sure, but no oral traditions, minimal art, lack of adapting other groups' tool kits.

Everything I can find fits the bill, which makes me wonder how they ended up like that in the Amazon, when there have never been any other human groups known do be like that in the rest of the new world.

It's pretty evident that early humans and even neanderthals had art, language, etc so calling these people "pre-modern" is a misnomer.  Call them instead a cultural mutation.

Um no, there is some evidence of art in anatomically modern humans (the oldest piece is attributed to H erectus), but its sporadic, not part of the culture, about 40-50k years ago this changes, art becomes consistent, the objects/paintings being made are cultural as well, you see the same thing repeated over and over  Invention shifts gears at the same time, and new tools start showing up.

[Kai]

or its part of the culture and just not so slathered on as it is in H. sapiens sapiens. not to mention, poorly preserved.