The Pirahã - Language and Culture

Factual Questions
1

So a good friend studding Linguistics sent me a link about the Pirahã people and their language.

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html
Interesting enough. So I dug a bit deeper. To study the real meaning and implications of their lack of recursiveness. only to find a fantastical culture.

Tehy dont have words for:

Colors
Numbers
The past or future
Grandparents
Some phonemes are pronounced dependent on the speakers sex.
No recursion (the big one)
No God
No art

The guy that studied them is really the only one so we base much of this on his depictions. He did live with them for 7 years. The hid a sound for several year from him. It is a high pitched squealing sound like a balloon letting the air out.
What is the Dope on this tribe.

Is it a hoax? I kinda think maybe
Misrepresentations of facts
A fantastic culture
OR what?

2

I’m a phonetician, I don’t personally work with UG in any meaningful way, and I only learned as much as I had to about syntax and semantics, so you’re getting a highly biased personal opinion here, but with regards to Piraha I’m fairly certain of two things:

  1. Piraha is a really, really cool language.

  2. Daniel Everett isn’t a very thorough researcher.

Essentially, there are three big problems with Everett’s claims: one is that he draws extremely broad conclusions from limited data, which a lot of researchers aren’t comfortable with. Another issue is the fact that since it’s such an understudied language most of the existing data about Piraha comes from Everett’s fieldwork, and a lot of experts are uncomfortable composing responses or rebuttals without corroborating data from other researchers. The third, and most relevant issue, is that the few independant researchers who have done fieldwork on Piraha seem to have found data that directly contradicts Everett’s claims. I’m afraid I don’t have a cite in front of me, though I’ll look, but I seem to remember the biggest findings being that the language demonstrates recursion in a plain and very demonstrable manner, and that Everett’s claim about the lack of tenses seems to have resulted from a fundamental misunderstanding about the grammar.

As for the phonemes differing by sex, that wouldn’t be too unusual: gender-specific dialects have been observed in other languages, and while it would be interesting, it isn’t unique.
ED: I just found a series of language log posts about Piraha, and I’m hoping they provide a more balanced opinion than mine. ^^