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"I yam what I yam."
IMHO, Ustwo hit upon the most likely explanation for the intellectual level of this tribe. i.e. It is a specific issue with the tribe: They live isolated from competition. They live in a hot, humid, forested climate which makes an easy subsistance living for hunter/gathers. They are probably inbred to the nth degree which makes them prone to double-digit I.Q.s. If one's survival is not an issue all sorts of ideas and tools become not worth formulating or creating.
From personal experience with aboriginal tribes, I am guessing that birth position/clanism could also be a factor. When competition is taken away from human development, there can be no synergism of ideas and effort. Individual intellectual effort will never benefit from association with other individuals in the clan system. Their societal situation would never allow an individual (a little brighter than most) to step forward some day and point to a hand saying "look I have this many fingers on this hand and the same on my other hand.....now I can count that many objects". If that individual was not from the most select clan of the tribe, he/she would not be listened to. In a clan based society, it is not permissible or even imaginable to accept new ideas from the lower born. Sadly, the odds against an individual from the birth position of being born to the most select clan also becoming the one person in the whole tribe to develope the ability to see the relationship between fingers and counting objects becomes astronomically high.
The bottom line is that this tribe never has had the need to count specifically in integers for its survival as a group.
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