Amazon Tribes Know Geometry

While high school freshmen sometimes struggle with parallelograms and the Pythagorean rule, people deep in the Amazon quickly grasp some basic concepts of geometry.

Although these indigenous tribes had never seen a protractor, compass, or even a ruler, a new study found they understood parallelism and right angles and can use distance, angles, and other relationships in maps to locate hidden objects. The finding suggests all humans, regardless of language or schooling, possess a core set of geometrical intuitions.

"While geometrical concepts can be enriched by culture-specific devices like maps, or the terms of a natural language, underneath this variability lies a shared set of geometrical concepts," said study co-author Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University. "Those concepts allow adults and children with no formal education, and minimal spatial language, to categorize geometrical forms and to use geometrical relationship to represent the surrounding spatial layout."--Bjorn Carey, LiveScience.com