Geometry skills are innate, Amazon tribe study suggests

Similar questions were posed to 30 adults and children in France and the US, some as young as five years old. 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." Most surprisingly, the Mundurucu actually outperformed their western counterparts when the tests were moved from a flat surface to that of a sphere (the Mundurucu were presented with a calabash to demonstrate). For example, on a sphere, seemingly parallel lines can in fact cross - a proposition which the Mundurucu guessed far more reliably than the French or US respondents. This "non-Euclidean" example, where the formal rules of geometry as most people learn them do not hold true, seems to suggest that our geometry education may actually mislead us, Dr Pica said.   link