[LINK] Languages of the World on the Basques and their history

[rfmcdonald]

In her post "On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for the Indo-European Debate", Asya Perelstvaig looks at what the latest in linguistics and genetics mean about the history of the Basques and wider Europe.

With those clarifications in mind, let’s now turn to the Günther et al. article. According to the authors, they conducted the first ever “genome-wide sequence data from eight individuals associated with archaeological remains from farming cultures in the El Portalón cave (Atapuerca, Spain)”. These pre‑historic individuals “emerged from the same group of people as other Early European farmers”. The advancing agriculturalists mixed with—and eventually acculturated—local hunter-gatherers. Besides showing how agriculture must have spread through southwestern Europe, which Günther et al. argue was mostly through migration rather than cultural transmission, the genome data from the El Portalón skeletons sheds new light on the origins of the Basque people: because “the El Portalón individuals showed the greatest genetic affinity to Basques”, Günther et al. conclude “that Basques and their language may be linked with the spread of agriculture across Europe”.

In other words, three population waves can be distinguished in the pre-historic peopling of Europe: Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, Near-Eastern agriculturalists, and Steppe pastoralists. (Some scholars deny the existence/importance of the third wave, but recent genetic evidence, discussed in my earlier post, strongly supports migration from the steppes.) Each new wave mixed with, acculturated, and in some cases subsumed the pre-existing population. While this broad-strokes picture is largely agreed on, the issue of which contemporary groups show how much genetic and/or linguistic connection to which pre‑historic population is a more controversial one. Thus, Basques have been commonly assumed to be descendants of the first population wave, the hunter-gatherers. Gradually pushed into the mountainous “refuge zone” in the Pyrenees, they maintained their genetic uniqueness (for instance, earlier genetic studies found them to have “a higher-than-normal frequency of Rh‑negative blood types”, as pointed out by Balter), as well as their language. Or so the story went. If Günther et al. are correct, Basques are descendants not of the hunter-gatherers but rather of the agriculturalists who spread through southern Europe and into Iberia, ultimately from the Near East.

This conclusion has important consequences for the Indo-European debate. If the distinctiveness of the Basques is a result of them being descendants of an earlier wave, surrounded by a sea of advancing Indo-European-speaking groups (primarily, Celtic- and later Latin-speaking), and that earlier wave was the farming population, it follows that the advancing Indo-Europeans must be the third population wave, the steppe pastoralists (who eventually adopt agriculture, as more suitable to the geographical conditions of their new habitat). In other words, the finding that links Basques to agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers provides a strong argument in favor of the Steppe theory of Indo-European origins (as schematized on the left). According to the Anatolian alternative, the original Indo-Europeans were the Near Eastern agriculturalists, who later spread into Europe. For this to be possible, we need to assume that the Basques and the Indo-Europeans were two very different waves of agriculturalists that presumably came from different places and did not mix much. There is little evidence, as far as I am aware, to support such a scenario.

But as mentioned above, we should be careful about distinguishing “peoples” and their languages. As Balter points out, we “cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Basque still has its origins in a hunter-gatherer language that was retained and carried along as farming spread throughout Iberia”. Is this possibility, however remote, a way out for the advocates of the Anatolian theory? I remain skeptical about this scenario, however, as it would involve hunter-gatherers contributing the Basque (or more broadly Vasconic) language, the agriculturalists contributing the distinctive Basque genetic make-up and the Indo-European language, with the steppe pastoralists bringing in the characteristic “Indo-European” DNA signature but making no major impact on the language. This scenario seems quite outlandish to me.