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.