You're probably right, I'm basing my opinion solely on a book I read once.
What was the book called? Historians and anthropologists sometimes have an unfortunate tendency to dabble in linguistics without really having much experience with it.
And aaah, Pirahã, the little Godwin's Law of linguistics: bringing a hiccup into any discussion since neither of the participants have any trustworthy data or experience in it.
Still, the absence of recursion was the only fundamentally weird thing about it, the rest is mostly par the course. Tiny phoneme inventories are rare but not unheard of: check out Papua New Guinea, for example. Non-comparative color terms are not a given as well.
Here is a WALS listing which has a bunch of languages with very few color terms (not two, though.)
And since it is my understanding that the recursion thing has been disproved, I see no reason to get hype. Well, maybe a little hype, because it's cool. But not world-ending levels of hype.
The dolphins thing is way rad, though there was really no need to use terms like "words" or "sentences" when those terms are ill-defined even for 'human' linguistics. The rest of his article seems solid to me (I have little experience with dolphins and biology/ethology/whatever, though, so I have to just assume he's citing people who know what they're doing).
Still, I hope somebody gets on that dolphin language case soon, because otherwise it will be left to marine biologists, and that won't go well.
Whale thing rad as well, even though the article seems to imply they just have segments with no segment organization levels - so basically, no morphology or syntax. Huh.