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The talk is an overview of the datasets, genetic, archaeological and linguistic in nature, which support the Paleolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT) of European prehistory. More specifically, based on the findings of genetics (studies of Y-chromosome and mtDNA), archaeology and historical linguistics, the following hypothesis has been brought forward for testing. It argues that during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the hunter-gatherers of Europe retreated to the south of Europe, settling into three refugia, one in the Balkans, one in the Ukraine and a third in the Franco-Cantabrian zone, a geographic location where the Basque people and their language have survived. According to the results of various teams of geneticists and archaeologists, at the end of the LGM along with the warming of the climate that ensued, the hunter-gatherers inhabiting the Franco-Cantabrian zone slowly moved north and westward to take advantage of the food resources in the newly opened territories. Studies of Basque DNA (paternally transmitted Y-chromosome and maternally transmitted mtDNA) have shown significant similarities between Basques and populations inhabiting present and former Celtic-speaking zones along the Atlantic Façade. Furthermore, various haplogroups found among the Basques show up in other populations of European descent, leading the geneticists to argue that this situation might best be explained by positing out-migration from this zone over a period of several thousands of years, starting at the end of the LGM.
Moreover, it follows that populations in the rest of Europe might be related in some way to the out-migration that took place when people began to move out from this geographical region as the ice sheets retreated. In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of researchers –composed of geographers, archaeologists and geneticists, namely, Dr. William Davies, Dr. Paul Pettitt, Dr. Lee Hazelwood and Dr. Martin Richards coordinated by Dr. Clive Gamble, described the situation this way: “A major population expansion occurred in Western Europe during the Late Glacial (15-11.5ka CAL PB) as the OIS2 ice sheets retreated and unglaciated areas in the north became available for re-settlement. Phylogeographic analysis using molecular evidence assigns 60% of the European mitochondrial DNA lineages (Richards et al. 2000), and an even higher proportion of West European Y-chromosome lineages (Semino et al. 2000), to a population bottleneck prior to an expansion from southwest to northern Europe (Torroni et al. 1998; Torroni et al. 2001; Achilli et al. 2004; Rootsi et al. 2004; Pereira et al. 2005)” (Gamble et al. 2006: 1-2). The key question posed by the research concerns the nature of the language that was being spoken by the hunter-gatherer populations when they moved out of this refuge. Gamble et al. was the first team of researchers to pose this question explicitly: “The growing evidence that the major signal in European genetic lineages predates the Neolithic, however, creates serious problems for the agriculturalist perspective. If western Europe was, to a large extent, repopulated from northeast Iberia [the Franco-Cantabrian zone] then, since place-name evidence suggests that people in this source region spoke languages related to Basque before the advent of Indo-European, the obvious corollary would seem to be that the expanding human groups should have been Basque speakers” (Gamble et al. 2005: 209).
The presentation lays out the methodology has been developed to test the validity of the corollary that Gamble et al. set forth in 2005. In the latter section of the talk the methodology is laid out and applied it to a concrete data set. The approach is a comparative one. It takes morpho-syntactic elements classified as Proto-Indo-European and compares them to what appear to be their counterparts in Euskara. Tests are then applied to determine the nature of the lineage of the two sets of morphemes in question. The PIE elements are ones recognized as common across IE languages and, therefore, as constituting the most archaic strata of these languages. However, until now IE research model has not sought to explain the origin of these morphological elements themselves.
Keeping in mind the results of the genetic studies cited above, the Basque language becomes a possible candidate for additional comparative work. Moreover, by focusing on reconstructing morphemic lineages, not languages, the PCRT approach to the data allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the linguistic evidence. To date the results suggest that two different layers of morphological elements can be identified in Indo-European languages, one much older than the other. The older elements coincide with morphemes indigenous to the Basque language, that is, elements that are not borrowed from IE languages. Rather, according to this model, they would go back to a family of hunter-gatherer languages of which Basque is the most direct descendant, while some of these same morphological elements were passed on and inherited by IE languages.