There are, even today, languages that lack words for numbers higher than 2, 3, or 4 -- including a number of Australian languages. This tends to be more true fo

There are, even today, languages that lack words for numbers higher than 2, 3, or 4 -- including a number of Australian languages. This tends to be more true for languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer. (See, e.g., Caleb Everett's Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Culture and references therein, or this article: https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers-75828 https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-whe...). Studies of people who are native speakers of such languages actually do have difficulties keeping precise track of different numbers of items, at least at the level of five or more. (There are Australian languages with more extensive number words, which is probably where the examples of "Pleiades = 7 women" stories come from.)