The contribution of non-western cultures, especially oral and traditional cultures, to the phenomena of civilizations remains controversial. Until recently, while modern anthropology was busy demonstrating the rationality of witchcraft, other practices in non-western cultures were considered devoid of scientific reasoning and therefore anthropologically uninteresting. The approach proposed here attempts to demonstrate the contrary. Indeed the study of the linguistic faculties of the Yoruba of West Africa shows that the system of language acts as a mirror of intuitive knowledge, providing a profusion of ontological proto-terminologies and proto-concepts encoded in language and cognition. Using them, one can establish the adequacy of human mathematical geometrical ideation in a particular cultural context where science and scientific development seem not to have existed as they did in Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India or Europe. From a comparative standpoint, the study shows that the beginning of theoretical constructions in the areas above was also in itself deeply intuitive, starting from basic human intuitive knowledge, the knowledge that forms the basis of ontogenetic development. The study postulates a universal human intuitive mind though the mathematical ideation examined is culturally and socially specific. As to the origin of that mind, the question is still open. Indeed, to understand the adequacy of mathematical ideation in this particular cultural context, we need to undertake interdisciplinary and thematic research on the origin of man, the way the brain works, languages and their origin, languages and mind, genes and anthropology. The present study illustrates a case of a culture of rationality in a non-western oral society that can serve as an empirical basis for theoretical constructions and innovations for the stabilization of cultural foundations.
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