Joe Rogan Experience #2547 - Daniel Everett

Portuguese explorers in 1784 documented aspects of the Pirahã language and people.

Brazil's Instituto Socioambiental, which tracks the country's Indigenous peoples, says the Pirahã specifically "appear in chronicles and documents only from the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th." Earlier 18th century accounts exist for the broader Mura people the Pirahã descended from, but not for the Pirahã as a separately named group.

The founder of Brazilian anthropology recorded a comprehensive word list of the Pirahã language in 1920.

The researcher who first connected the Pirahã to the Mura people and wrote some of the earliest accounts of them was Curt Nimuendajú, a German born ethnologist who visited Pirahã villages in 1921. He's one of the most important figures in early Brazilian ethnology, but calling him "the founder of Brazilian anthropology" overstates his role, and the record from that visit is general ethnographic notes, not a documented comprehensive word list.

There are approximately 8,000 separate languages in the world.

The major language databases put the real number lower than this. Ethnologue counts a bit over 7,000 living languages, and even Glottolog's higher count tops out around 7,900. Rounding that up to approximately 8,000 overstates the commonly cited figure.

A student of Noam Chomsky contacted the Brazilian Indian Agency to label linguist Dan Everett a racist.

This blends two separate events. Cilene Rodrigues, a linguist aligned with Chomsky against Everett, did write to Brazil's indigenous affairs agency FUNAI in 2007 raising objections to his research, but she never disclosed what that letter said. The explicit accusation that Everett was racist came later, in a 2009 interview she gave to a German magazine, not in anything sent to FUNAI.

The oldest known wooden structure in human history, dated at 500,000 years old, was discovered in Zambia by Larry Barham.

Larry Barham's team really did find this wooden structure at Kalambo Falls in Zambia, and it really is considered the oldest known wooden structure. But the dating published in the 2023 study is 476,000 years, not 500,000, so the figure here rounds up more than the actual research supports.

Homo erectus had brain sizes between 950 and 1,000 cubic centimeters.

Homo erectus brain sizes actually varied a lot more than that, from about 546 cubic centimeters in some early specimens up to 1,251 in the latest surviving populations. Averages differ heavily by region and time period too, with East Asian Homo erectus averaging close to 1,000 cubic centimeters, so treating 950 to 1,000 as the general range for the whole species understates how much it actually varied.

Noam Chomsky stated that Dan Everett's linguistic contributions were nothing in an interview on a Spanish-language station.

The real event here is a February 2009 interview Chomsky gave to Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil's biggest newspaper, not a Spanish language station. In it he called Everett "a pure charlatan" and said serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him, which is close in spirit to saying his contributions amount to nothing, but the language and format don't match what's described here.

Dan Everett's first linguistics book read was Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky.

When Five Books asked Everett to name the books that shaped him as a linguist, he put Edward Sapir's Language first and Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax third. Nothing in his own account suggests Aspects was literally the first linguistics book he read, and his actual path into the field ran through missionary linguistics training at the Summer Institute of Linguistics before he got into Chomskyan theory in graduate school.

The Pirahã people do not possess a concept of possession or being possessed.

Pirahã grammar does have a way to mark possession, using a pronoun placed next to the possessed noun, so it's not accurate to say they lack the concept entirely. What Everett actually argues is narrower: Pirahã doesn't allow recursive or stacked possession, so you can't say something like "my friend's brother's house" in a single sentence.

The Pirahã population has grown from under 200 to between 700 and 800 due to increased medical assistance.

Population figures for the Pirahã do show real growth, just not matching these exact numbers. Brazil's Instituto Socioambiental put the population at about 90 people in the 1920s and 1970s and 141 in a 1985 census, while more recent counts put it at 900 as of 2024, which supports the idea of substantial growth tied to more outside contact and medical care, but no source we found shows the population sitting specifically at 700 to 800.

The Pirahã people work approximately 15 to 20 hours per week in a subsistence lifestyle.

The 15 to 20 hours a week figure is real, but it comes from general hunter gatherer research, especially Richard Lee's studies of the Kalahari San people, not from any specific study of the Pirahã. Even that original research is contested: when Lee counted food preparation time along with hunting and gathering, his own numbers came out closer to 40 hours a week.

The speaker stopped identifying as a Christian in 2001.

By his own account Everett had privately abandoned Christian belief by 1985 and kept that private into the late 1990s, well before 2001. The year 2001 does show up in his history, but as when he formally left the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the missionary organization he'd worked under, not as the year he stopped identifying as a Christian.

The Pirahã people punish severe crimes that threaten community survival through permanent banishment.

Ethnographic accounts describe the Pirahã responding to someone breaking cultural norms with ostracism, not sharing food with that person for a few days, which is a real but much milder practice than permanent banishment. There's also a documented case of violence directed at outside intruders rather than a formal system reserved for severe, community threatening crimes.

The Pirahã people avoid violence at all costs.

Everett's own account describes a night when Pirahã men, drunk on cachaça supplied by a Brazilian trader, worked themselves up to try to kill Everett and his family for a shotgun, an incident he had to defuse by disarming his neighbors himself. Ethnographic accounts also note that violence can occasionally happen, especially under the influence of alcohol or toward outsiders, so "avoid violence at all costs" overstates a culture that is genuinely peaceful most of the time but not without exception.

The average brain size for men is 1,200 cubic centimeters and for women is 950 to 1,000 cubic centimeters.

Men's brains do average larger than women's, but the commonly cited figures run higher than stated here: around 1,260 cubic centimeters for men and 1,130 for women, not 1,200 and 950 to 1,000. The women's figure in particular understates the accepted average by a meaningful margin.

There are approximately 8,000 languages in the world.

Same issue as the other language-count figure in this episode. Ethnologue, the standard reference, counts a bit over 7,000 living languages today, and even the higher Glottolog count tops out around 7,900. Approximately 8,000 rounds past what either source actually says.

The Paha people have occupied the river where they currently live for nearly 300 years.

Everett's own peer reviewed paper on the Pirahã describes "more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians" as of 2005, and other accounts describe first contact with Portuguese prospectors a bit over 200 years ago. That points to a documented history in the area of a bit over two centuries, not nearly three.

After the introduction of sugarcane, almost 100% of the Pirahã population developed cavities.

It's well documented in dental research that introducing high sugar foods to a population that didn't have them before causes cavity rates to climb fast. But a flat 100% cavity rate is an extreme, absolute number, and we couldn't find any actual clinical or dental survey of the Pirahã to support that specific figure, so the real increase is likely dramatic without necessarily being universal.