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| A researcher (left) poses with members of the Amondawa tribe in Brazil. |
An Amazonian tribe has been discovered that has no concept of time or dates, scientists said today.
The Amondawa people of Brazil do not even have words for 'time', 'week', 'month' or 'year', said Chris Sinha, of the University of Portsmouth. He argues that it is the first time scientists have been able to prove time is not a deeply entrenched universal human concept, as previously thought.
Professor Sinha, who reported his findings in the journal Language And Cognition, said: 'For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us.
'We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract. This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are "people outside time", but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.'
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