More than 3,500 years ago, Semitic-speaking peoples in contact with Egypt borrowed hieroglyphs to write sounds. A drawing of an ox head, “aleph,” became the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, then Greek alpha and our A. Turn a capital A upside down and you can still see the horns. The Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets all descend from that same ancestor.
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.