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Comment by HanayamaTriplet | Hacker News Reader

That reporting is completely factually incorrect [1]. There is no evidence that the tribes are unable to distinguish colors or are able to see colors that other people can't.

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237

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Actually, this statement is not factually correct either. While there might be a debate about Himba tribe and colors, there are other tribes like Karajá and Waorani, as they both are counterexamples to universals of color naming, which could imply a possibility of perceptual differences as well ( see Regier et al., 2009)

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/369843

could imply a possibility of perceptual differences

isn't quite the same as

is able to discriminate among shades of green that basically look the same to us

If you read the paper cited you will see it is even more dramatic than that: "Thus, the color-naming system of Waorani, like that of Karajá, does not fit the structure of perceptual color space. Although neither Waorani nor Karajá has been regularly held up as a counterexample to universals of color naming, they both are genuine counterexamples"

Also, from the actual Himba study (by the way,the study was conducted and published) "Himba participants show categorical perception only for their own linguistic categories and not for either the supposed universal categories of English" Roberson et al., 2005 (full citation in another comment)

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