I am profesor Mark Pagel from the University of Reading in England. I am an evolutionary biologist and I came to the Jauzarrea congress to talk about work we have been doing on a superfamily of languages known as the euroasiatic superfamily. We think this superfamily combines the mayor language families of eurasia extending from the West cost of eurasia to Pacific and the East cost of Pacific all the way to the West on the Atlantic,.

We think this language family is about fifteen thousand years old and we think it records the movement of people throughout eurasia at the end of the last ice age when the ice sheets were retreating from the continent of eurasia. The way we have identified this superfamily of languages was we were able to predict the existence of a small number of words that we think change so slowly over a long period of time that they retain traces of their ancestry that might come back ten, twelve, fifteen, maybe even twenty thousand years. We were able to identify about twenty or twenty five words that we think show ancestry among this language families that allow to extend to put a date on a tree of about fifteen thousand years.

What was interesting to us for the Jauzarrea congress was to ask how the language Basque fits into this euroasiatic superfamily of languages and we know that of course Basque people live in the Basque autonomous region today and we know that there was Basque people in this region when the indoeuropean language speakers moved into this region about seven thousand years ago, and we also know from genetic studies that there were Basque people in this area maybe fifteen to eighteen thousand years ago. So those people were here before the euroasiatic languages finely started to evolve, and when we study the Basque language we see that we can not find any links between it and the other mayor language families of eurasia, and this tell us that the Basque people and Basque language were probably here before fifteen to eighteen thousand years ago in a refuge area where the other languages never overtook them.

And so we think there is a good reason to believe that the Basque language and the Basque culture might extend back well behind the time of the origin of this language family to the time of our history when the human beings were hunter-gatherers and living life off of the land.