DO BASQUE-SPEAKING AND CAUCASIAN-SPEAKING POPULATIONS SHARE NON-INDO-EUROPEAN ANCESTORS

Genetic evidence is consistent with the view that the Indo-European la nguages were propagated in Europe by the diffusion of early farmers. T he existence of phylogenetic relationships between European population s speaking other languages has been proposed on linguistic and archaeo logical grounds, and is here tested by analyzing allele frequencies at ten polymorphic protein and blood group loci. Genetic distances betwe en speakers of Basque and Caucasian languages are compared with those between controls, i.e. contiguous populations speaking Indo-European a nd Altaic. Although some statistical tests show an excess of genetic s imilarity between Basque and South Caucasian speakers, most results do not support their common origin. If the Basques and the Caucasian-spe aking populations share common ancestors, recent evolutionary phenomen a must have caused divergence between them, so that their gene frequen cies do not appear more similar now than those of random pairs of popu lations separated by the same geographic distance.