In 1868, August Schleicher composed 'The Sheep and the Horses' in Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and English, spoken roughly 6,000 years ago. No one has ever heard this language. The fable has been rewritten several times since, as linguists' reconstructions have improved.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.