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This timeless existence caused quite a stir when first
reported thirty years ago by a missionary who, having
met his match, (the tribe completely lost interest in
Jesus once they had established that the missionary
had never met him) put down his bible and became
instead a linguist and anthropologist. It turns out that
the Pirahã are not unique. A team from the University
of Portsmouth has recently discovered that there is
another Amazonian tribe, the Amondawa living only
by their biological clocks following the natural
rhythms of night and day, rainy and dry seasons.
This tribe has no words for time, no weeks, days,
hours or years and therefore no concept of age –
instead a person’s name changes throughout his
lifetime to reflect his stage of life. Professor Chris
Sinha from Portsmouth University argues that studies
of the tribe prove that time is not, in fact, the deeply
entrenched and universal human concept it was
previously assumed to be.
A Millennia or Twenty Until Teatime
For cavemen it probably didn’t matter if it was ten
past five or half past nine. Hunter-gatherers need only
mind the seasons and keep track of when different
plants bear fruit, when food animals migrate or when
the rains or snows are coming. It is probable that man
first measured time by following the cycles of the
moon, which mirrored the tides and the fertility of
women and the earth. An archaeologist called
Alexander Marshack working back in the 1970s
re-interpreted a number of Paleolithic carved and
notched bone artefacts, previously regarded as little
more than idle doodles, as simple lunar calendars.
The oldest is a bone plate from the Dordogne, about
30,000 years old, (pictured below), on which there are
serpentine strings of notches. Marshak believed these
markings, 28 in number, to represent the waxing and
waning of the moon. Possibly, he said, this is a
pregnancy calendar made to track that most
fundamental mystery of all – life itself.
squirrels act from instinct rather than a true awareness
of planning for the winter. The reason your dog knows
exactly when it is dinnertime is probably down to his
being more in tune with his circadian oscillators than
we humans are. These are the complex biochemical
mechanisms built in to all living things that oscillate
within a rough period of 24 hours responding to light
and dark. Their purpose is evolutionary: the early bird
catches the worm and all that and the phenomenon is
more commonly called the biological clock.
The human biological clock today tends only to get a
look in when it malfunctions (jet lag) or
ticks loudly.
I wrote a few months back about how the human
biological clock is set for two distinct periods of sleep
with the eight hour all night sleep an invention of the
industrial revolution. An invention followed closely
by the invention of the sleeping pill. At some point in
the history of man we began to externalise time so that
we could measure it. As far as we know, only humans
do this and indeed some argue that to be human
is
to
be aware of the passage of time. But although it is
nigh on impossible to imagine living without a
consciousness of time, remarkably not all human
beings alive today have such a concept.
Keeping it in the day
We all know someone who lacks a sense of time.
I know a man so incapable of being punctual that he
is universally known as
the late Ben,
but I’m not
talking about the chronically tardy
.
The Pirahã tribe
of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (pronounced
Pee-da-HAN) are supreme hunter-gatherers. They can
walk naked into the jungle and emerge three days later
laden with food and useful things but their language,
limited mostly to whistling, has no past tense and tribe
members use no numbers beyond a simple concept of
one, two, many. Life for the Pirahã is lived in the
moment: they have neither stories nor interest in
where they came from or who their ancestors were
and they have no religion.