Q17. Are the Basques genetically different from other Europeans?
A17. Apparently, yes. It has long been known that the Basques have the highest proportion of rhesus-negative blood in Europe (25%), and one of the highest percentages of type-O blood (55%). Recently, however, the geneticist Luiga Luca Cavalli-Sforza has completed a gene map of the peoples of Europe, and he finds the Basques to be strikingly different from their neighbors. The genetic boundary between Basques and non-Basques is very sharp on the Spanish side. On the French side, the boundary is more diffuse: it shades off gradually toward the Garonne in the north. These findings are entirely in agreement with what we know of the history of the language.
Q18. Does this mean the Basques are directly descended from the earliest known human inhabitants of Europe, the Cro-Magnon people who occupied western Europe around 35,000 years ago?
A18. Nobody knows. This is possible, but we have no real evidence either way. The only evidence we have is negative: the archeologists can find no evidence for any sudden change in population in the area for thousands of years before the arrival of the Celts and later the Romans in the first millennium BC.
I hope this is not the first of a series. I'll be watching the news carefully for the next few weeks...
O negative--universal donor, fairly scarce, desirable commodity at the Red Cross.
Huh. Interesting. I do know that Basques are blonde-- Aryans in the midst of the sallow French.
Any source for a quick crash course in Basque seperatism?
Basques are thought to be the remnants of Atlantis. They escaped a natural disaster in the area of Cuba and settled on the Spanish coast.
So I have read.
From
http://basque.unr.edu/16/16.1t/16.1.1.faqs1.htm
Frequently Asked Questions I
The Basques, origins and language
Who are the Basques?
The Basques are a people who live in a small region (about the size of Rhode Island) that straddles the border of Spain and France from the sea in the west into the Pyrenees in the east. This area is called Euskal Herria (comprising seven provinces, historically: Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and Navarra on the Spanish side; Laburdi, Zuberoa, and Behe-Nafarroa on the French side). Basques speak a language called euskara, but today only about 25% of the population is fluent in that tongue. Even so, the word for a Basque person, euskaldun, means “possessor of the Basque language.” The Basque population is distinguished physically by a high incidence of Rh Negative factor in the blood.
Where do they come from? No one knows exactly where the Basques came from. Some say they have lived in that area since Cro-Magnon man first roamed Europe. Estimates of how long they have lived there vary from 10,000 to 75,000 years. Some say they are descended from the original Iberians. More fanciful theories exist, as well. One is that the Basques are the descendants of the survivors of Atlantis.
Where does the Basque language come from? Just as no one is sure about the origins of the Basques themselves, linguists are not in agreement over the origins of Euskara, the Basque language, either. (In Basque, the word euskara is not capitalized, but when using it in English, it is customary to capitalize it, just as we capitalize the names of other languages.) Although there are theories (none of them proven beyond a doubt) that Basque is related to other languages (such as the Georgian family of languages in the Caucasus, or the Berber language family of Africa, or even the Quechua language of Latin America), so far the only thing most experts agree on is that Euskara is in a language family by itself. That is, it is not related to any other language in the world. It is, therefore, not an Indo-European language (the large group to which English, French, Spanish, and Russian belong).
How many Basque Speakers are there in the Basque Country? There are less than 600,000 fluent speakers in the Autonomous Community of Euskadi (Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa) and about 400,000 more who have learned some Basque but are not considered fluent. Since most of the Basque speakers of the world live in that area, these numbers give us a close estimate of the number worldwide. There are perhaps 15,000 speakers in Iparralde (the three provinces on the French side of the border), and it is estimated that about 10% of the people in Navarre speak Basque. There are also pockets of Basque speakers in Latin America and in North America. Basque speakers are called Euskaldunak, possessors of Euskara, and those who learn the language later in life are called Euskaldun berriak, “new Basques.”
No insults intended here, but I always wondered if the Basques may carry remnants of Neanderthal man genes...
High preponderance of -Rh would go a long way toward explaining the frailty of intermixing with Cro-Magnon genes.