Although questionable in the minds of most anthropologists, some linguistic evidence might point toward the Iberian Peninsula. In the 1960's, the Morris Swadesh in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, claimed he found a connection between the Nadene (Athasbascan) linguistic family of North America and the Basque linguistic isolate. This connection, he argued, dated back thousands of years. Basque is the only European language to have survived the influence of proto-Indo-European, which entered the Basque region more than 5,000 years ago. One can infer then that Basque language is at least 5,000 years old, and some argue it is far older. The Basque themselves contend they have survived in their homeland for tens of thousands of years. Though Swadesh has been criticized as a lumper when it comes to linguistic correlations, the claim is nonetheless intriguing under the circumstances. It should be noted that linguist Merritt Ruhlen recently reported to have located a language related to Nadene in Asia. Ket, the only remaining member of the Yeniseian family of languages, shares common words like "birch bark" with some Nadene languages. Ket is spoken by about 550 people (out of a total population of 1,100) who live along the Yenisei River in central Siberia (Lysek 2000).
> This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters. The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records, and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origin of the people themselves remains a mystery also.
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