Is counting instinctive?

This is pretty amazing, These researchers have looked at indiginous tribes in the in the Amazon who have had no formal education and used some very clever tests to see how instictively they think of numbers.
The surprising result is that they found that instinctively they mapped numbers onto a logrithmic scale rather than a linear one suggesting that the concept of a linear scale is a technological advance learned through formal education.

This is interesting also because of the Weber–Fechner law, which attempts to describe the relationship between the physical magnitudes of stimuli and the perceived intensity of the stimuli. It finds that the relationship between stimulus and perception is logarithmic.

As the Authors themselves say:

The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.

You can get more here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1217