Ed, (01)
That is undoubtedly true: (02)
> My original position was that Basque is descended from one of
> those [very early] languages, because it is not Indo-European
> and it is not Semitic, or in fact related to any other known
> language. (03)
But there have been multiple migrations out of Africa into the
rest of the world for the past 40 to 60 thousand years. There
were Cro-Magnon people in Europe since about 35,000 years ago. (04)
See the abstract below, which suggests that the Basque gene
frequencies indicates that they may have diverged from the
more common European branch at least 18,000 years ago. (05)
If you're interested in these topics, you might check Google
for references to Nostratic, which is a hypothetical superfamily
of "our" (noster) languages (including PIE and ohters) that may
have diverged from a common origin in northeastern Africa around
15,000 years ago. It is supposedly an older language from which
PIE is just one branch. The Russian linguists have been doing
a lot of work on those languages for years. (06)
However, there were other waves of emigration out of Africa
for many millennia before that. The languages of Australia,
for example, have been isolated from other languages for
about 40,000 years -- they may be related to whatever the
Cro-Magnons spoke. (07)
The linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen have
been going even farther back in trying to reconstruct
a "Proto-World" language from about 50,000 years ago. (08)
You can find a lot more about this work by searching for
the above names. But it is very controversial. (09)
John
_______________________________________________________________ (010)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=8147436&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google (011)
Principal component analysis of gene frequencies and the origin
of Basques. (012)
Calafell F, Bertranpetit J. (013)
Laboratori d'Antropologia, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de
Barcelona, Spain. (014)
The genetic peculiarity of the Basque population has long been noted. We
aim to describe Basque distinctiveness in space and assess the internal
Basque heterogeneity. All these aspects are relevant to the question of
the origin of Basques. After a thorough literature search, a data base
was created containing all the available data on gene frequencies in the
Iberian Peninsula and France. Twenty-nine systems, comprising 71
alleles, were used to carry out a principal component (PC) analysis. The
results show a sharp peak in the first PC in the Basque area, which
remains even when the geographic scope is widened to include western
Europe. As demonstrated by "wombling" analysis, the steeper slope in the
first PC is found to the east of the Basque area, along the Pyrenees.
Measures of genetic heterogeneity (such as FST values) within the Basque
country, as compared to those for non-Basques, do not show a particular
internal substructuration in the Basque population. The genetic results
support a scenario in which the Basques are the product of in situ
differentiation around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000
B.P.), in agreement with archaeological and linguistic data. Isolation
from the surrounding populations has allowed the differentiation to last
for millennia, but has erased the differences existing among Basques. (015)
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