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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.
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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...
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Sorry for your father but nothing in the article makes sense
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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!
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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:)

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Ah, reminds me of good old CGI websites.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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Oh! Sorry- I meant to refer to the hypothetical proto-Celtic language!

This is what vibe-commenting from memory gets me.

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The proto-Celtic that is Indo-European? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language
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Proto-Celtic is also an Indo-European language...
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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.

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