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The above chart includes data from 162 male volunteers who submitted their Y-chromosomal DNA results to Family Tree DNA's Basque DNA project. Individuals who submitted their Y-DNA results claim to be of direct male Basque descent. Contributing volunteers included residents of Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Analysis of the data reveals that 71.6% of the participants in this study carry Y-DNA of haplogroup R1b1 and its subclades.

Basque People
The Basques as an ethnic group, primarily inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country, a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France. Since the Basque language is unrelated to Indo-European, it is often thought that they represent the people or culture who occupied Europe before the spread of Indo-European languages there.

Y-DNA in the Field of Linguistics
Y-DNA haplogroup testing is a valuable tool in the study of historical linguistics. Y-DNA is carried from father to son, and mutates at a somewhat predictable rate. Haplogroups are clades of DNA types that share a distinct defining mutation or mutations. Each such mutation occurred in a single person at some point in the past. Since the person in which that mutation occurred necessarily spoke a language (at least in the time-frame of the past 50,000 years or so), and since a large percentage of children learn to speak the same native language as their father, one can use Y-DNA studies to track the historical evolution of languages, and uncover ancient relationships between living language families, to a surprising degree of accuracy.

When using Y-DNA as a tool to discover relationships between living language families, however, one must take into account the fact that there are several reasons why children may not learn to speak the native language of their fathers. The most obvious of such a situation is when the father either moves to a region that speaks a different language or has a child in a region where another language is dominant in addition to his native language (i.e., a more dominant local language is taught in schools, used in business, etc.), and rather than learning the native language of the father, children adopt the local language.

The goal in interpreting the data from this study is to determine which, if any, of the individuals whose Y-DNA first contained the defining mutations of the haplogroups, may have spoken a language ancestral to modern Basque, i.e. "Ancient Basque."

Haplogroup E Among Basque People
93.8% of those tested reported haplogroups of Eurasian origin, whereas 6.2% reported haplogroup E and its subclades. Haplogroup E is common among ethnic groups which originated along northern portions of the Nile River in Africa, including speakers of Nilo-Saharanm, Niger-Congo, Mande and certain Afro-Asiatic languages. The infusion of Y-DNA haplogroup E among the Basque population likely took place long after speakers of the ancestral Basque language arrived on the Iberian Peninsula, perhaps after the Afro-Asiatic speaking Moors invaded southern Europe. That is to say, the Basque language is unlikely to share a common origin with the Nilo-Saharan or Afro-Asiatic language families, although males of Northern African descent who migrated north to the Iberian Peninsula apparently interbred with women of the Basque population, perhaps influencing the local "Ancient Basque" language, but not replacing it.

Outliers in Haplogroups L, O and Q
Of the 162 individuals tested, there was one individual who carried haplogroup L, one who carried haplogroup O, and one who carried haplogroup Q. These haplogroups are of Eurasian origin, but are probably not associated with speakers of Ancient Basque. The individual who carried haplogroup Q resided in China and reported that his most distant known paternal ancestor resided in Mexico and had a Basque surname. It should be noted that Y-DNA haplogroup Q is the most common haplogroup among native (non-European) Mexicans, and not likely indicative of a Basque origin, despite the Basque surname. Haplogroups L and O generally correspond with South Asian and Asiatic languages, respectively. As the present-day Basque language shares little in common with members of these well-studied language families, the individuals likely represent a very small segment of the Basque population who descend from recent (less than 5000 years ago) immigrants to the Basque country from southern and eastern Asia.

Haplogroup R1a1 on the Iberian Peninsula
While haplogroup R1a1 appears in this sample at a percentage of 3.7%, that rate is similar to, if not less than, the occurrence of R1a1 in surrounding regions. R1a1 likely corresponds to DNA of native speakers of Indo-European languages, who settled the Iberian Peninsula and likely wiped out all recent branches of the Anc

MSgt Mike Branford receives an Associates Degree in Applied Sciences from the Community College of the Air Force.