Posted on Friday 24 October 2003

And here's a little snippet about the language spoken by Adam and Eve (well, not exactly, but...). It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Adam was, in fact, a Basque.

Gene research is helping clear up the mystery of the origins of the Basque people, a culture that apparently came out of East Africa 50,000 years ago and passed through the Middle East on the way to Western Europe, a University of Nevada researcher says.

That's one of the reasons when reviewing documents written in the ancient Sumerian language, "you would swear you are reading Basque," said Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, adjunct professor for the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

It's also why some cities in the Middle East have names that could be Basque-related, such as Ur, Uruk and Mari, he said. The name of a Basque goddess is Mari.

"The Basque came out of East Africa 50,000 or so years ago and passed through the Middle East," Mallea-Olaetxe said during a recent presentation at Northeastern Nevada Museum as part of the National Basque Festival in Elko.

Mallea-Olaetxe said scientists traced the female gene back 150,000 years to East Africa but for research purposes followed the male Y chromosome that enables researchers to trace human whereabouts.

They started tracing the male gene to 60,000 years ago in East Africa, and then through the Middle East to Central Asia some 40,000 years ago, the professor said.

Linguists suspected long before the genetic research that an old language in Central Asia "looked suspiciously like Basque," Mallea-Olaetxe said. That language, Burushaski, is dead now, he said.

So genetic research is proving the linguists right, he said.

[Genes help solve mystery of Basque origins]