Languages that lack abstract concepts of time

An article being published in many news sources this week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711) claims that an Amazonian tribe called the Amondawa lack a concepts of time - but again, I find the headlines to be a bit misleading.

Disregarding The Sun and The Daily Mail, since it's generally a cheap shot to pick at their science news, we'll take a look at the BBC, who ran the headline: "Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says", while directly below by a few lines, they quote one of the researchers as saying, "We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'... Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events..."

Isn't that contractictory?  

The researchers seem to be commenting more on the way the Amandowan people use their language, and do not appear to map time onto space such as with words like 'hour' and 'year'.  They still seem to use a concept of time, as it is mentioned people's names change as they age and come into a different stage of their life - it sounds like a pretty strong concept of time to me!  Just perhaps different linguistically from the languages we are used to in societies that are constantly watching the clock.

One of the research team along with an Amandowan child and their parent

It is noted, of course, that Amandowans who speak Portuguese are completely able to use these time-space mappings.  This supports how our culture affects our language - while the influence the other way around might be much smaller.

Neanderthals in the News

Something that really irks me is the way that Neanderthals are potrayed in the popular media, even in science based outlets. Sensational titles like,

• "Neanderthal Males had Popeye-like Arms" (Discovery News)
• "Neanderthals Were More Promiscuous Than Modern Humans, Fossil Finger Bones Suggest" (ScienceDaily)
• "Neanderthal man 'sang and danced'" (BBC)
• Or, even, "Was Neanderthal man the original metrosexual? New study suggests he wore make-up" (to be fair, that last one was from the online version of the Daily Mail, Mail Online so we can't expect much!)

These titles suggest a whole lot more than the content the article actually discusses, much less findings of the research the article is written about.

It's true titles like these serve their purpose and grab the readers attention, and of course misleading titles altered to be more suprising or shocking pervades media on other topics too. But the result is that the message the reader takes away can be a very mislead one.

Yesterday an article on Neanderthals was published in ScienceNOW called "Neandertal Brains Developed More Like Chimps'". To the reader, this would have a very suggestive implication that Neanderthals brains are somehow chimp-like, and attrubute them with chimp-like behaviour. But really, what the article is about (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/neandertal-brains-developed-more.html?rss=1), is how human brains are different from other primates, with a unique brain growth pattern early on in child brain development. Science Daily covered the same story with the title, "Brains of Neanderthals and Modern Humans Developed Differently", and Discovery News with, "Human, Neanderthal Brains the Same Until Birth".

It is facinating to look to our past in amusement when the first Neanderthal bones were uncovered in Germany in the 1850s, and how the image of the arthritic lumbering cave man emerged in popular culture. With todays media, however, that image looks no nearer to a true picture of our late sister species.