Origin of the Basques

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The origin of the Basque people has been shrouded in mystery. The Basques have occupied much the same area of northern Spain and southern France for thousands of years, extending further eastward and northwards into Gascony and the Pyrenees, as attested by archaeological and toponymical evidence, and speak a language whose ties to other living languages are unclear at best. Nowadays it is accepted that most likely, the Basques are the last surviving people from a time of European prehistory when Indo-European languages were not yet widely spoken in the continent.

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[edit] Early attestation and native territory

The key sources for the early history of the Basques are the classical writers, especially Strabo, who in the 1st century AD reported that the Vascones inhabited modern day Navarre, NW Aragon and lower La Rioja. He also mentioned other tribes between them and the Cantabrians: the Varduli, Caristii and Autrigones. There's no evidence of their language but it's commonly accepted that all these tribes were Basque-speakers - at least with great likelihood. Another important Basque-speaking group were the Aquitanian tribes of Gascony, whose language, attested by funerary slabs, is now agreed to be very close to Basque.

[edit] Evidence from language

It is unknown whether Vascones spoke an old form of the Basque language. Surviving place names and a few personal names tend to suggest they spoke old Basque, but we cannot be sure. Equally uncertain is whether the previous inhabitants of the modern Basque territory—the Varduli, Caristii, and Autrigones—were related tribes. Some researchers, based on the meager historical evidence we possess, think that they were Celtiberian peoples, speaking languages not related to old Basque.

In fact, the best evidence for a Basque-related language is in Gascony in southwestern of France, where the local Aquitanians spoke a language which may be related to Basque. (This extinct Aquitanian language should not be confused with Occitan, a Romance language spoken in Aquitaine since the beginning of the Middle Ages.)

There is toponymical evidence that the Basque language was once spoken over a much wider area than the modern day Basque country. This is specially attested by toponymy, that extends the proto-Basque linguistic area at least to all the Central Pyrenees, Upper Ebro valley and all Gascony.

The German linguist Theo Vennemann claims that such toponyms are found throughout Central and Western Europe, these areas having been settled by speakers of the so-called Vasconic languages after the ice age. That theory, however, is rejected by most historical linguists.

[edit] Old theories about Basque origins

Even assuming that the Vascones were the Basques, the prehistory of the people before that time is necessarily conjectural. The major theories in contention are:

[edit] Prehistoric origin

The only archaeological evidence for an invasion of the Basque Country dates to some 40,000 years ago when Cro-Magnon people first arrived in Europe and superseded Homo neanderthalensis. Another possibility is that a precursor of the Basque language may have arrived with the advance of agriculture, some 6,000 years ago.

DNA methods for seeking ancient ancestry are increasingly being used to test the origins of the Basques.[1][2][3] An interesting aside is that Parkinson's disease may relate to the Basque dardarin mutation.[4] Partly as a result of DNA analysis, "...there is a general scientific consensus that the Basques represent the most direct descendants of the hunter-gatherers who dwelt in Europe before the spread of agriculture, based on both linguistic and genetic evidence..."[5] This would make them the descendants of some of the earliest human inhabitants of Europe. The Basque genetic markers also reveal a very strong relationship with the Celts in Ireland and Wales.[6][7] The shared markers are suggestive of having passed through a genetic bottleneck during the peak of the last ice age, which would mean the two peoples were in Europe by at least about 17,000 years ago, and probably 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. Despite the genetic connection, there is little reason to suppose that the Celtic languages are related to Basque. It is rather probable that British people related to the Iberian population switched to Celtic with La Tène culture migrations, but we can only speculate on whether these ancient Irish and British speakers were using a precursor to Basque or some other language.

Some authors also believe that the Basque language provides evidence for a Stone Age origin: the words for knife and axe may come from the root word for stone,[8] suggesting that the language developed when knives and axes were made of stone rather than bronze or iron. Mitochondrial DNA analysis tracing a rare subgroup of haplogroup U8 places the ancestry of the Basques in the Upper Palaeolithic, with their primitive founders originating from West Asia. [1]

[edit] Thousands of years in the same region

Regardless of which theories are correct, it is quite possible that the Basques arrived before the Celts and likely that they are the oldest continuously surviving people inhabiting a particular location in Europe. It is believed that they have lived in or near their present location for at least four thousand years, a relatively small group of people surviving when many others were overwhelmed by invaders. A number of early Basque writers sought to explain this — in keeping with the academic fashion of their time, typically through speculation about racial superiority — but the endurance of the Basques can also be explained by good fortune: they happened to be in the right place over and over again.

Whether the Basques chose their easily defended home in the Pyrenees or were forced into it at some time in the past, it is common for mountainous regions, as with islands, to remain as bastions of an otherwise vanished culture or people. In a similar manner, for example, when the extensive Celtic cultures of Europe were overwhelmed by invaders, the only remaining areas speaking Celtic languages were Ireland and a number of remote mountainous or coastal bastions in Brittany, Scotland, and Wales which retain Celtic speakers to the present day.

In any case, the Basque homeland is well suited to survival. Its low mountains are combined with dense forests and vegetation which make it impassable to outsiders en masse, but still temperate enough to support a large agricultural base—one where the soil is poorer than the surrounding plains, leaving the area a much less tempting target for invaders. Furthermore, the Basque areas have few reserves of precious metals, especially in comparison to the gold reserves to the west in Spain or to the wealth in Gascony just to the north. The Basques seem to have ended up in the best locale on the European continent for uninterrupted survival.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ↑  http://cmpg.unibe.ch/teaching/HGH_3rdcourse_2005.pdf (PDF file)
  2. ↑  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/ahg/2005/00000069/00000006/art00006
  3. ↑  http://news.boisestate.edu/newsrelease/archive/2005/072005/0726basquedna.html
  4. ↑  http://www.mdvu.org/emove/article.asp?ID=811
  5. ↑  http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/21/7/1361
  6. ↑  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/9/5078#B30
  7. ↑  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1256894.stm
  8. ↑  Online Ch.1 of The Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky, 1999, ISBN 0-8027-1349-1
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