Question: Until recently, the Basque people of Europe were thought to have descended directly from huntergatherers, based on language similarities. Why is shared DNA information a more reliable indicator of ancestry than shared language?
Example 3
The Basque people, who have a distinct language, live on the coastal border of France and Spain. The
700,000 modern Basques had long been thought to descend from hunter-gatherers who lived in the
area about 7,500 years ago, before the first farmers arrived. DNA told a different story. Researchers
compared the genome sequences of bones from eight Basque farmers who had lived in a cave in
northern Spain from 5,500 to 3,500 years ago to genomes from other skeletons representing several
European hunter-gatherers and early farming groups, as well as to modern Europeans. While the
ancient farmers had genomes representing many groups, including those of hunter-gatherers, the
Basques indeed have a unique genome – but one that descends from the earliest farmers, not from
hunter-gatherers. Apparently, their uniqueness today is due to their self-imposed isolation as the rest
of Europe interbred. Source: Lewis, Ricki. Human Genetics Concepts and Applications (2018). Twelfth
edition. McGraw-Hill Education.
Question: Until recently, the Basque people of Europe were thought to have descended directly from huntergatherers, based on language similarities. Why is shared DNA information a more reliable indicator
of ancestry than shared language?
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