The fact that static formalism has prevented linguistics from grappling with the origins of language has not, of course, prevented persons from other disciplines – with unfortunately, but inevitably, rather less understanding of all that language entails – from trying their hands at it […] all of them suffer of the same defect: they concentrate, exclusively or almost so, on the moment when recognizable speech first emerged, when Ug first said to Og “…..” (“…..” being some kind of meaningful, even if only monolexical, proposition, delivered in the vocal mode). This, which one can only characterize as the Flintstones approach to language origins, totally ignores the vast amount of preadaptation that was necessary before you could even get to that point, and equally ignores the vast amount of postadaptation that was necessary in order to get from that point to fully developed human language.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.215