3 modern French Basque raw DNA 23andme format

Euskara, the Basque language, is a linguistic isolate — it has no proven genetic relationship with any other known language, living or extinct. It is the oldest surviving language in Western Europe and predates the arrival of Indo-European languages to the region. Despite centuries of Roman, Visigothic, and later Castilian and French influence, Euskara has persisted and is still spoken today, particularly in the Spanish provinces of Biscay, Gipuzkoa, Álava, and Navarre, and in the French Basque Country.

Basque is theorized to be related to Aquitani, an extinct group hailing from southwestern France.

The Basques likely descend from Paleolithic or Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who settled in the region long before the Indo-European migration. By the time of the Roman Empire, they were known as the Vascones, living primarily in the region of present-day Navarre. The Romans encountered them in the 1st century BCE, and although parts of the Basque Country were incorporated into Roman Hispania, they retained a degree of autonomy and were never fully Romanized in language or culture.

Following the collapse of Rome, the Basques resisted both Visigothic and Frankish attempts at domination. One of the earliest major historical mentions is their ambush of Charlemagne's rear guard at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778, an event immortalized in the Song of Roland.

Founded in the 9th century, the Kingdom of Navarre was a major Basque political entity. Early rulers included Íñigo Arista, who is considered the first king of a distinctly Basque polity. The kingdom was powerful in the 10th and 11th centuries, at times stretching into parts of modern Spain and France.

Today, the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain enjoys significant autonomy, including control over education, police, and language policy. Euskara is co-official with Spanish in this region. In France, Basques have less autonomy, although there are growing cultural preservation efforts.

I used qpAdm to estimate the ethnic breakdown of the basques.

In the neolithic, roughly half of the ancestors of the basques belonged to a group known as the anatolian neolithic farmers. Basques are unique in Europe because of how low the west asian contribution is, caucasus with iranian ancestry combined makes up only 13 percent of their genome. This is lower than in every other European ethnicity bar sardinians.

But basques actually do have quite a decent chunk of indo-european ancestry, despite not speaking indo-european languages. On this model, the basques score a decent chunk of corded ware ancestry.

For this video, I gathered the raw DNA of 3 ethnic basques from France and analyzed their genome using my Trait Predictor tool.