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Deep in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, there are no cities or roads. The only way to get in is by boat or with a special kind of airplane that can land on the water. The foliage is so thick that you can barely see the sky when you’re underneath the trees. And the few people that live there live very different lives from people in the United States, or even people in the rest of Brazil. They can go for months or even years without ever seeing people from outside the jungle. Because they live so far from civilization, they don’t need to have jobs or money. They get what they need to eat by picking it off trees, catching it in the water, or hunting it with bows and arrows. When they need to sleep, they go to huts made of palm leaves with dirt floors and use thin tree branches as a bed.

One of the most unusual of these groups of people is called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). There are about 300 of them around today. They don’t have farms, don’t create art, don’t tell stories, and don’t sleep for any longer than two hours at a time. None of them know how to write. The Pirahã first met people from the outside 200 years ago, but they’ve decided that they mostly want nothing to do with us. They still regularly meet traders, who offer them T-shirts, tools, and sugar for their nuts and wood. But they can’t have conversations because the Pirahã don’t speak Portuguese, the language of Brazil. In fact, they refuse to learn any other language but their own.

And the language they speak is perhaps the strangest thing about them. They often sing, hum, or whistle in it instead of talk. And it’s missing a lot of words that English and most other languages have. For instance, they have no words for colors. If they want to say something is red, they have to say it looks like, say, berries or blood. They don’t keep track of which people in their tribes are their aunts and uncles, so they don’t have words for those people. And, they don’t have words for numbers. You could even say they don’t use numbers at all.

They don’t know how to count, not even on their fingers. If you show a Pirahã person five fish and ask him or her to show you the same amount back, he or she might show you four fish or six fish instead. One adventurous scientist lived with a Pirahã tribe for a while and tried to teach a group of adults there how to count and add. After several months, they still couldn’t learn how to add 1+1.

Some people have assumed that this means the Pirahã are stupid. But the scientists that have met them agree that they are just as smart as anyone else. They are excellent hunters, know the plants and animals of the rainforest better than most scientists, and also make very clever jokes. So why can’t they learn math? Some scientists think it might be because they don’t have any way to talk about numbers. It’s hard to think about something if you don’t have a word for it!

The Pirahã themselves certainly don’t seem to care. They don’t have any reason to count things, and they’re happy living simple lives in the jungle with only a few other people around. They don’t mind that they own very few things and don’t know much about the outside world. In fact, almost all of them say the way they live is much better than living in towns and cities, shopping in stores, and going to school or work. Would you agree? How would you live if you had to choose?