| ▲ | lobf 9 hours ago |
| I spent a year of high school in the Basque Country, and it always stuck out to me that a common feature of the Basques, especially the beefy ones, was incredibly caveman-like. I know this is not unique to this population, but I also always wondered if it correlated to the fact that it is one of the historic Neanderthal populations. I have a photo of a dude I used to play soccer with that looks like I put a Neanderthal model from the natural history museum in a jersey, and I have met very few people like that in the states. The Basque Country is a very small population. |
|
| ▲ | tren 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My Dad wrote an article about this 25 years ago or so: https://aoi.com.au/LB/LB705/ (How the Neanderthals became the Basques). He would really get a kick out of people reading it (he's 90 now). His website goes back to 96' and it shows. |
| |
| ▲ | dumol 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Greetings to your father from a European with O- blood, fair freckled skin, and a receded chin! I've always been fascinated with Neanderthals. Happy to see science slowly realising these were not some stupid brutes... | |
| ▲ | poulpy123 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sorry for your father but nothing in the article makes sense | |
| ▲ | onlypassingthru 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That is a gem of the old internet; concise, informative, well articulated, it's got it all. Tell your pa thanks for keeping it up for me! | |
| ▲ | riffraff 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It was a fun read! Although one of the references goes to a now dead "reptilian agenda" website which might have been even more interesting:) | |
| ▲ | olibhel 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah, reminds me of good old CGI websites. |
|
|
| ▲ | boxedemp 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Basque Country also has an interesting language which doesn't seem related to other European languages. Basque language (or Euskara). Seems as though it could have been an enclave of neanderthals who eventually integrated with humans. |
| |
| ▲ | lobf 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a much-discussed topic. All we know of the Basque language is that it is pre-Indo-European. The last time I looked in to this, the consensus was that it was most likely a version of otherwise-extinct ancient Celtic. Now that doesn’t mean that the Basques don’t have a potentially outsized Neanderthal genetic influence, but the odds of their language being so ancient as to pre-exist modern humans entirely is unlikely. | | |
| ▲ | vintermann 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition. We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe. | | |
| ▲ | lobf 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh! Sorry- I meant to refer to the hypothetical proto-Celtic language! This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me. | | |
| |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm just an armchair wikipedia browser, but it's an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language This article talks about the Basque language from before contact with the Romans, 5-1 centuries BCE. It also references a "pre-proto-basque" language, that would have been the one before the Celtic invasion of Iberia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtiberians). The rabbit hole kind of ends there, as not much linguistic artifacts or history remain from BC unfortunately. But one can imagine the Basque society would live in relative isolation for a long time before that. |
|
|
