A Pirahã man participates in a new experiment that, researchers say, indicates that his language contains no number words, even for the number one.
Talk about living in the moment! The Piraha people, a tribe in the Amazon, give insight into how innate a ‘taoist’ approach to life may actually be, and that the human mind has just gotten a little sidetracked of late. Of late meaning the last 10,000 years or so. For an overview, read: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
Briefly, this author of the book is a missionary who went to proselytize to members of a remote Brazilian tribe (and eventually became a full-fledged linguist). This tribe has no creation myths or storytelling traditions. They live in the present and believe only in what they and their comrades directly observe  a cultural characteristic that lead Everett to abandon his own faith. Need I say more?
Also, this article, Numbers beyond words, discusses how this Brazilian group grasps exact quantities without naming them.
