The Armenian Origin of Basques

Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, published a new book «The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story» (http://www.amazon.com/Origins-British-Genetic-Detective-Story/sim/0786718900/1?ie=UTF8&pf=book). He claims that the historians are wrong in almost every aspect. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s restoration of events based on Y-chromosome and mtDNA analysis, three-quarters of the ancestors of the modern British arrived on what became the British Isles between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, when Britain was still attached to the mainland of Europe. They shared a genetic heritage with the Basques and spoke a language related to Basque language. The British Isles were not populated then, the new arrivals in the British Isles found an empty territory. Thus both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. But these incursions had little effect on the basic Basque genetic heritage. That heritage is strongest in Ireland, where only 12 percent of the population descends from migrants who came after the Basques. In southern and eastern England, nearer the Continent, the figure is about one third. The Anglo ¬ Saxons and the Celts were small immigrant groups. «Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years,» he writes.

«…So the question comes where Basques originated from? The Basques are unique ethnic group, that inhabit parts of northwestern Spain and southwestern France. There have been several hypothesis regarding origin of those people. But lets refer to the founders of Basque national historiography Esteban de Garibay, Andres de Posa and Baltasar de Echave. All of them considered Armenia as homeland of Basques. Esteban de Garibay thought that Iberia was populated by descendants of Tubal, Noah’s grandson, who went to Iberia thirty-five years after the Flood subsided. Garibay observed that Basque place-names bore a resemblance to those in Armenia (http://www.gipuzkoakultura.net/ediciones/versus/estevez-es.htm).

Baltasar de Echave writes: «the first settlers arrived to Iberia after the Universal deluge with the children of Noah from «ours loved mother country Armenia» (http://www.ingeba.euskalnet.net/lurralde/lurranet/lur22/ore22/22ore. htm).

Interestingly legendary ancestor of the Basques had a name Aitor, which in Armenian means Grandson of an Armenian. The Armenian origin of Basques was strongly supported by several prominent researchers, such as Gaspar Eskolano, Edward Spencer Johnson, Joseph Karst, Bernardo Estornes Lasa, Nikolay Marr.

In conclusion, there was a genetic study done in different regions of Armenia, that detected that the characteristic genetic code prevalent in Welsh, Basques and Irish, called the Atlantic Modal Haplotype, is also present in Armenian population of Syunik and Karabakh. These are two Armenian provinces predominantly isolated in the mountains, which precluded genetic admixture with neighboring ethnic groups and nations».