These two sentences were obviously from two differnet sources.
It has long been my contention that the Basque were indigenous to all of europe before the Celtic invasions.
Could the Basque be desendents of the neolithic beaker people?
You are correct. Two different studies.
"Could the Basque be desendents of the neolithic beaker people?"
I don't know any thing about the beaker people. I expect the Basque did have a larger area under their control at one time. They probably survived all attacks by withdrawing to the mountains between Spain/France where they live to this day.
The Beaker People, partially credited with the building with the second stage of Stonehenge, are late Stone Age people who are thought to have emerged around 2200 BC. They were so named by archaeologists because of the brightly colored, geometrically patterned earthenware drinking vessels often found in their graves. It is thought they made these vessels for over five centuries.
They might have been immigrants who crossed the North Sea, or local people who had developed new ideas and ways of doing things.
It is speculated that these people were farmers, living in huts grouped in small villages.
The Beaker People radically changed Stonehenge by constructing two concentric but incomplete circles at its center. The blue stones which composed these circles where once thought to have been transported from the Preseli mountains in southern Wales, over 200 miles away. But upon the discovery of a similar stone in a nearby earthen barrow the theory emerged that the huge stones might have been deposited by glaciers in the area.
The changes which the Beaker People made at Stonehenge suggest that they were sun worshippers. It appears they made the monument into a temple of the sun, rather than the moon. In their burial mounds, or barrows, were found thin gold discs incised with simple sun-like motifs.
Another suggestion that the Beaker People worshipped the sun is that they changed the main axis of the henge by throwing 25 feet of the bank back into the ditch. This widened the northeast entrance to the right. This caused an adjustment in the axis from 46 degrees to 50 degrees from the north/south line. Then the middle of the wider entrance was now in alignment with the sunrise of the summer solstice.
The Beaker People also included a rectangle around the original standing Four Stations, which are thought to have been erected during the building of the first stage of Stonehenge, with the stones marking its corners. Lines drawn through the short sides of the rectangle seem to indicate the midsummer sunrise, while lines through the long side point to the most northerly position of the setting of the moon.
A diagonal running from east-southeast to west-northwest pointed to the sunset on May Day, the Celtic festival of Beltine, the "Shining One." (See Druidism.)
http://members.tripod.com/~Halfmoon/
Perhaps the greatest mystery of Scottish or even European history is the people who once inhabited the lands north of Hadrian's Wall and as far north as the Shetlands. Who were these fiercely independent people? Where did the come from? Which language did they speak? What did they call themselves?
We first hear of them in the third century from a Roman writer, who describes their fierceness and battle skills. The writer Eumenius, writes about them 200 years after Rome has been in Britain, and the name associated with the Pict is forever coined.
To this day, we do not know if this is truly as in "pictus" (the Latin for "painted") or a Latin form of a native name. Because of the isolation of northern Scotland, history yields little, and the Roman Empire's expeditions into the north ended in little gains.
"We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded...by our remoteness and by the obscurity which has shrouded our name...Beyond us lies no nation, nothing but waves and rocks"
The above words by the Pictish chief Calgacus are recorded by the Roman enemy in the words of Tacitus and are a perfect example of the obscurity and legendary status held by the Picts almost 2,000 years ago.
Early Scotland
The earliest recorded evidence of man in Scotland is dated to 8,500 B.C. It is thus that a few thousand years before the birth of Christ, Neolithic men from Spain and France, makers of fire and herders of sheep and cattle had already made their way to Scotland.
Some archeologists suggest that these people may have built and used the great chambered cairns which dot the Scottish countryside.
It has also been suggested that their descendants eventually merged with the Beaker people (who probably came from northern Europe), and this ethnic union made up the pre-Celtic stock of the northern lands.
The link of these early inhabitants to their Iberian ancestors can be found in the many spiral pattern grooves cut into the rocks and boulders of this northern land and which can also be found in Spain, France and Ireland.
The design of burial chambers located in the Orkney islands also provide an important link to the Iberian origin of their builders.
Farming arrived in these islands around 4,000 BC (3-4,000 years after it started in Asia Minor) and as it replaced the nomadic way of life, the Orkneys became an island fortress with its many stone settlements.
By the time Rome became a world empire, the Orcadians were recognized by Rome as a sea power.
From recent excavations, it seems that these Orcadian people were a slim, swarthy Caucasian race, with long, narrow heads.
The great stone circles such as Sunhoney were probably being built around 3,300 BC, quite possibly around the same time as the arrival of the Beaker people from Northern and Central Europe.
These newcomers were of a different ethnic group from the Iberian stock in northern Britain, as their skulls were much broader and round.
Evidence of contact between these new people and their continental ancestors have been discovered in several excavations, and seem to indicate a flourishing trade between ancient Scotland and Europe.
It is thought by many scholars that the union of these two peoples resulted in the creation of the pre- Celtic stock eventually loosely called Pict by the Roman and Cruithne by the Celts.