Amazon tribe study suggests geometry skills are innate

A study on an Amazonian tribe has suggested that we are born with geometry skills.

Researchers examined how Mundurucu tribe think about lines, points and angles and compared the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren.

The tribe showed comparable understanding and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.

"Mundurucu is a language with only approximative numbers," Pierre Pica of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France told BBC News.

"You don't have a lot of geometrical terms like square or triangle or anything like that, and no way of saying two lines are parallel... it looks like the language does not have this concept," he said.

So, their study concluded that the capacity or intuition for geometry is present in all peoples regardless of their language or level of education.

The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.