Linear B, found on clay tablets from Crete and mainland Greece, defeated specialists for half a century. In 1952, Michael Ventris, a British architect with a passion for codes, showed that it recorded a very early form of Greek, more than 3,000 years old. Few expected that: many had assumed it was an unknown language.
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.