Genetics and the Basque

I was always fascinated by the language and ethnic group isolates in Europe, the Basque.

Living in the Pyrenees straddling the borders of Spain and France, the Basque people boast an insular cultural identity, as well as a language that is neither Indo-European (like Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, or Baltic) nor Finno-Urgic (like Finn, Estonian, or Magyar). It has no known larger family or connection anywhere in the world.

Mysteries abounded about the people, and they had their own stories about where they came from, about how they were the original people in Europe, how they took over the caves from the Neanderthal. Maybe I made that last part up.

But a recent genomic study showed that a modern Basque person's genome, once sequenced, was indistinguishable from Iron Age remains from a nearby necropolis. Multiple thousands of years later, at least a hundred generations, and the genomes were the same. This was from before the Celtic, from before the Roman and Greek, and, apparently from before the Proto-Indo-Europeans arrived.

It looks like they were from the first Europeans...at least remnants from one of the earliest waves of human arrivals, which is pretty cool.

And then there's the language. So different than any Indo-European language, so different from Finno-Urgic...I'm not a linguist, but maybe I would have been if things broke differently (at least that's what I've been told), and how languages work in their own context I've always found interesting.

I snatched this visual for how the Euskara (the Basque language) works, and while it's different, it seems logical:

Now, like other languages that are tenseless (and I'm not sure Euskara is tenseless), they use verb aspect to delineate whether or not an action has completed (essentially past tense), as well as the regular use of the ergative case, one of the more confusing grammar-related concepts around (that a deep-dive doesn't clear up as much as show how many grammar rules one has forgotten in thirty years).

Nowadays, my interest in the mystery of where the Basque came from has fallen off in favor of a different mystery: how, over the course of five- to six-thousand years, were they able to keep to themselves so diligently?  Historically, mountains slow armies, not keep them out forever. The Celts, the Romans, the Germanic-tribes, the Moors, even Franco's bullying and murder only led to losing some of their language heritage, which they've since gained some of it back. It has to have been a conscious effort. 

Today, the people and language have given us names like the Bay of Biscay, as well as the city name of Bilbao.

Kinda makes me want to see what other languages trace back so far in specific places...I'm thinking the Amazon basin, Papua/New Guinea, or maybe even the aboriginal languages of the Americas or Australia...