Amazonian Bora people mimic the rhythm of their language for communication over large distances using drums

How can an entire language be mapped onto beats on two drums? To answer this question, an international team of researchers, including Frank Seifart and Sven Grawunder of the former Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and Julien Meyer from the Université Grenoble Alpes in France carried out research into the drummed speech system of the Bora people of the Northwest Amazon. What they found was that the Boras not only reproduce the melody of words and sentences in this endangered language, but also their rhythm. This suggests the crucial role of linguistic rhythm in language processing has been underestimated.