Cristina Calderón died in February 2022, aged 93, in southern Chile. She was the last person to have learned Yaghan as a first language, the tongue of a canoe-faring people who lived around Cape Horn, the southernmost people on Earth. Chile had named her a 'living human treasure'. With her granddaughter, she had recorded stories and words so the language would not vanish entirely.
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.