Where did you come from? Where do you go? Where did you come from, Basque?

Do you like mysteries?  If that’s a yes, good for you.  If no, well you are in the same boat as me.  I study history as my major, and I found it quite annoying to do research for this project because there are no clear answers to the enigma of the Basque tribe.  A people secluded for years in the Pyrenees mountains not only have a culture and language unique to them and them alone, but they have a genetic composition completely devoid of the regular strains found among their French and Spanish neighbors, let alone the other Europeans sharing the continent.  Some claim, especially a good few of Basque nationalists, to have the answers, but I will take a strong stand along with numerous scientists of different fields to stay that is rubbish.  I looked through numerous sources all over the internet- nothing conclusive.  I also went back to my world history textbook to try to find answers- again nothing conclusive.  I ended up only citing only two sources because they all say the same thing.

                Hopefully, the reader understands the effort I tried to put in to draw out an answer; however, it did leave me with plenty of facts to lay out.  The Basque culture gives barely any indication of where they came from as they share common pursuits of most every people on this earth- smithing, leatherwork, spinning wool, music, etc.  On the note of music, they do have a strong love for unaccompanied choirs.  Sports focus on power and endurance such as the picture in the BBC article which shows two men using a style of saw used by the Basque people called a tronza to cut a thick log.  Their language has no connection to any modern or extinct language.  It has components of many “Caucasian languages and [a slight connection] to Berber” (an indigenous North African people) (Woodworth 18).  Its words for numerals have similarities to both French and Sanskrit (Woodworth 19).

                This strange mixture of all these components leads most scientist and historians to surrender to the idea that the Basque are part of the select few peoples on Earth that have survived from the Stone Age near completely intact.  A “root-word haitz” meaning stone is found in the names of common tools is a common word that linguists have traced back to that Age (Woodworth 18).  To further cement that idea, genetic evidence leaves no doubt that they are not Indo-European.  Their tribe survived intact as it migrated up from Africa, through the Middle East, down into India, and back up along the Southern border of Europe into the Iberian Peninsula where they eventually settled within the natural fortress of the Pyreness.  The only parts of their genetic make-up that seems to mark any significant change shared by their Indo-European neighbors is the genes of a distinctly agricultural people that migrated through Europe (BBC News).   They brought with them the agricultural processes they had knowledge of and eventually melted into existing hunter-gatherer tribes in Europe.  However, the next great migration at the onset of the Bronze Age from the Steppes does not show up in their gene pool (BBC News).  Somewhere between the end of the Stone Age and beginning of the Bronze Age the Basque seem to have consciously moved into their mountain fortress. 

I say consciously because they raided Visigoths who took over the territories of the Romans as their empire collapsed (Woodworth 26).  While out of any love for the Romans is hard to say because they did participate in very peaceful and constant trade with the Romans while managing to keep away the prying figures of the Romans to expand their territories (Woodworth 24).  “Trading settlements… [along] the coast of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Labourd” left no mark of Roman administration upon the Basque (Woodworth 24).  Much later in 711 AD, Muslim armies belonging to the Ummayyad Empire invaded the Iberian Peninsula.  After the conquest of most the peninsula and the start of a small kingdom along what is Northern Spain, the Basques were split in two as the two different governments that extended their control into the Pyrenees.  While being politically divided at this time, the “conquest” of their people did not show any changes in their genetics as it did the rest of Spanish descendants.

Works Cited

News, B. (2015, September 7). Ancient DNA cracks puzzle of Basque origins. Retrieved November 14, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34175224

Woodworth, P. (2008). The Basque country: A cultural history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.