This could be huge. It certainly will make charge-back harder to manage with customers.

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events,” he told BBC News.

“What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

Oh, oops, wrong Amazon. But it’s still interesting.

If I understand the theory correctly, events define the passing of time rather than a system of equal units. A sequence would be first I did this, then I did that, instead of I did this at mark 110 and I did that at mark 215. They could even have longer events and shorter events by definition. I look forward to the full report.

At first glance I am reminded that I rarely tell stories with a notion of independent time. Casual conversation with friends is not tightly bound by units “…so I left my house at 5:15pm and mounted my horse at 5:45pm, rode down to your house and arrived at 6:10pm”. I speak in more general terms of first this, then that, then this.

It is only at times (pun not intended) when others are trying to make reference that they ask about an independent time system. “What time did you arrive at my house?” The purpose seems to be for them to align their events with my events on a system that we both comply with.

Time as we know it is an example of compliance.

Consider the fact that a lot of software still is written without “notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring”. You might look in a log and find event 1 then event 2, but no clear reference to an independent clock’s time, let alone an official time server linked to an external time source.

I am obviously speculating on the report, but it makes me wonder if what these scientists are really saying is that they believe they have found a tribe in the Amazon that behaves a lot like software developers or systems that may be found on Amazon. Fascinating.

I believe this image comes from what they refer to as a “Microsoft event”:

A male tribe member stands near his unusual-looking sequencing tool