01/05/2025 - The Mystery of the Basques

The Basques are renowned for their strong identity and character, similar to people from France's Atlantic coast and northern Spain in general. Their origins and genetics are particularly fascinating. In many ways, the Basques are like a living snapshot of Southwestern France and Iberia from the Early Iron Age. Their ethnogenesis is roughly half from the Rhenish Bell Beakers (mainly those with the DF27 haplogroup) and half from the Megalithic peoples of Iberia and Southwestern France from the late Neolithic. This genetic mixture gives them one of the highest rates of WHG (Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry) in Europe.

 

Remarkably, the Basques show almost no genetic traces from the Roman period or from the Germanic and Viking raiders of the medieval era.

 

They speak a language, Euskara, that is not Indo-European, yet paradoxically, they have one of the highest frequencies of Indo-European Y-DNA (mainly DF27, with a few L21 lineages likely remaining from the Atlantic Bronze Age). At the same time, their level of Indo-European autosomal DNA (Yamnaya ancestry) is among the lowest in Western Europe. What a paradox!