Interesting

... to live the way they live.

They're not, as the Bible talks about, the sin of covetousness.

Well, that's one thing Pirahãs don't have.

Um, if you have something you wanna share with them, they, "Fine.

We'll take it.

You know, that's great." But, um, the only thing they ever ask me for are really small things.

Mm-hmm.

I understand it's not hierarchical, but just sort of broadly kind of characterize their culture for me.

Sure.

Sure.

If you took out all the country maps, all the country boundaries, and you looked at a map of South America and you looked at the Amazon, they are right smack in the middle of the Amazon, just right in the middle.

They're south of the big city of Manaus, which sits on the Amazon River proper.

They are a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon.

So If you were to fly into the big city of Manaus and rent a boat, you would travel about four days on that boat.

Like most, you know, like indigenous Native American cultures do.

Are there hyper-violent tribes in the Amazon?

All Amazonian tribes kill for a living.

They don't kill people for a living, but they are good at killing.

They know how to kill.

They kill jaguars.

A man alone walking in the jungle might have to kill a jaguar by himself.

I know a guy who was holding off a jaguar with his blowgun while the jaguar is snapping at his head.

How do they name themselves? How do they come up with names?

Tell us a quick story of them taking you hunting and what happened.

Well, I used to like to go hunting with them because I did all these activities with them, partially to help, partially to show friendship, but mainly to learn the words.

and learn the language.

I was really interested in learning all this vocabulary from the jungle.

So I asked if I could go hunting.

They're always reluctant to take somebody hunting who doesn't know the first thing about hunting in the jungle, because for them, it's food.

They got to feed their family, and they don't want a lot of interference from some noisy guy.

That changed the relationships in your life, did it not?

Yeah

...

I started getting hate mail, and then, um, uh, the, uh, the article came out when I first proposed this in the major journal of anthropology, Current Anthropology.

I was in Germany at the time at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and right down the hall from me was Svante Paabo, who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding the genome of Neanderthals.

And there was a reporter, a German reporter from Der Spiegel, to talk to him, and she found out about my article, so she walked down the hall after she interviewed him and interviewed me, and this came out, and it started to get picked up in the press in a lot of places.

And so The New Yorker did a big profile, but then the reaction came, and it wasn't what I expected.

I expected that if you make a proposal, that other scientists, if they're skeptical, which they have every right to be, are gonna propose experiments to test what you're saying, and they're gonna say, "Well, if they don't have recursion, you should find this, and you should not find that, and you should get this, and this, and this." And I tried to anticipate that, but that's the kind of object- objection I expected.

And they probably have completely different languages.

Did you ever get better at those things?

Not really.

No? For one thing, I like to hunt.

I started hunting when I was like 10 years old, pheasant hunting, dove hunting.

And so I do enjoy that, but I've never given it the time to become really good at it.

Now, if I were abandoned in the jungle, I probably would, but it would take me a long time.

These guys are using bows and arrows from the time they're two years old.

And they probably have completely different languages.

They converted you?

Yes, that's right.

Um, I was, uh, reading, uh, my translation of the Gospel of Luke into their language, and a man was helping me, and he...

Luke starts out with all of these, with the genealogy, and it's all these begets and beget.

Um, and the guy's sitting there trying his very best to understand me, and he said, "I don't know them.

You don't know them, so why do, why are we talking about them?" And I thought to myself, "You know, that's a very good point, actually." Um, and as I talked to them and my friendship with them expanded, and I began to use some of my reasoning, um, on my own beliefs, I began to be persuaded that in fact they had better evidence for their beliefs than I had for mine, and I kept this to myself.

You know, if you're a missionary being supported by churches in the US and you suddenly say, "I don't believe this stuff anymore," well, you're out of employment.

Take me through this part of the story.