Edo Nyland is famed nonsense non-scientist. But very entertaining. His methods are so far fetched that it is possible to prove the connection of any words in any language.
He has a homepage where you can see his method of analysing and reconstructing relationships between words and names. It is very entertaining for someone with enough brains and geeky enough. I'm not sure if the guy is serious and just plain crazy, or if he does it to annoy or mock serious "comparative linguists".
His homepage:
http://www.highspeedplus.com/~edonon/
I agree. It is absurd. One could say there is a genetic relationship between Basque and Ainu, but not linguistic. Regarding the genetic relationship, it's fairly weak (Basques and Ainu are presumably genetically closer to each other, for example, than Basques are to people from southern India, or Ainu to Australian Aborigines). The relationship is this: Wells points to a common origin for Europeans and northern Asians/American Indians in Central Asia about 35,000 years ago (associated with a Y-chromosome lineage called M45). The Ainu might be a relic population of this ancestral group, as might the apparently extinct Paleo-American population to which the Kennewick and Spirit Cave men belonged. The Basques are a relic of the earliest European lineage to derive from the common Central Asian ancestor (the M173 lineage which I talked about in my earlier post.)
I just can’t see anything “entertaining” about it. Some total BS is what he writes. It’s even more ridiculous that any people would buy the least bit into that with totally invalid “logic” or basically no logic at all. This article sucks and some people’s reaction are horrible. Is very basic scientific thinking so hard to achieve at all? Ridiculous. But still, many credits to you for pointing out such nonsense.