sparkey
Great Adventurer
- Messages
- 2,250
- Reaction score
- 352
- Points
- 0
- Location
- California
- Ethnic group
- 3/4 Colonial American, 1/8 Cornish, 1/8 Welsh
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- I2c1 PF3892+ (Swiss)
- mtDNA haplogroup
- U4a (Cornish)
One thing. People speak "mother languages" not paternal langaguages. So Basque language is not the product of Y.Chr but of mtDNA
Obviously it's a product of neither, and if language was universally matrilineally inherited, we would expect all of Iberia to speak Basque, wouldn't we?
Either way, we still don't have anything to compare Basque to, so we can't be sure when the language (or the ancestral language(s) from which it is derived) arrived in Western Europe. But if we're certain it's Paleolithic, we can rest easy knowing that there is significant Paleolithic Y-DNA among Basques, and that it is of the most common variety in the Neolithic (I2a1a), as we've mentioned. The only problem remaining if all of that proves to be true is explaining how R1b expanded within Basques... and that explanation doesn't even have to be entirely based on culture or language inheritance patterns.