In a linguistics course in college, this tribe was used as an example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Supposedly, members who were taught English and spoke it well still had trouble with relative direction because their original language (and culture) didn't have the concept. I always liked the example even if I thought it was dubious. Very cool to hear that someone else can corroborate that and make it at least a shared anecdote.

I believe the cultures in question know which way is North at all times, so this would be super easy for them, because the absolute position of an object that doesn't move never changes.

What kind of magical thinking leads people to accept these anthropological legends unquestioningly? 'there's a tribe who have no concept of left and right but always know which way is North' 'There's a tribe which has no concept of numbers greater than four but understands logarithms'...

What makes you think people accept it unquestioningly? There's plenty of evidence: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Diags.p...

You're actually demonstrating my point. That study is about an actualy Australian Aboriginal group, but the above commenters talk about nameless tribes in Africa. This is a common pattern in folk-anthropology where genuine cultural findings from field studies get overinterpreted, confused with other studies, elaborated and mythologized to the point where members of mysterious hypothetical African tribes have superhuman abilities to always know which way is North.

Reread parent. The person is spun around so they can't know absolute directions.

When they are first shown the room, they would think to themselves "the food is north of the blue wall". After being spun around they might not know which way is north, but they'll figure it out as soon as they spot the blue wall.

But what would happen if the researcher spun around the room as well?

Then their sense of "north" would become decoupled from true geographical north, but would still suffice for navigation within the current reference frame.