For millennia, humans have used languages consisting solely of whistles to organize, argue, gossip, even flirt across distances. We think of whistles as a way of getting attention or carrying a tune, incapable of conveying much meaning. But go to Antia in Greece, the foothills of the Himalayas, the Canary Islands, the Bering Strait, Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, the Brazilian Amazon, and dozens of other remote places, and you may hear volleys of human whistled chirps, cryptic trills, and fluted duets, entire conversations of lilting whistles a lot like bird sounds that communicate with all the
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