I have been reading up a lot of studies and also conclusions from those who have been busier with genetics than I have been able to. And the claim that Proto-Basques were a result of Early Farmers (low rh- Anatolians) and Hunter Gatherers never made sense to me.
So Eurogenes Blog asks the important question:
The key question now is who brought the steppe-related ancestry to Basque country. Were they Indo-Europeans or speakers of Proto-Basque? Also, did they actually come from the steppe, or somewhere nearby, like the Carpathian Basin?
Most geneticists do not want to speak about blood type frequencies as it confuses them.
I am not stating such as an attack, but far too many times you see someone asking if having blood type B means having some ancestry in Asia just to get a reply like ‘You need to study genetics first to understand that blood types and genetics having nothing to do with each others’.
Great, so you need to change your fields just to understand that somewhere down the line you have had at least one ancestor from Asia to make you blood type B?
It wouldn’t make sense that a population still 30-35% rh negative comes from two populations which were mainly 4% rh negative and another one 24% rh negative.
There is something missing here.
Eurogenes Blog states correctly:
A couple of recent papers argued that Basques were the direct descendants of local hunter-gatherers and early Neolithic farmers who arrived in Iberia from the eastern Mediterranean. This is probably correct for the most part, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
This is the other area I have an issue with where so many want their latest findings to be IT.
It is far more important to use blood type frequencies at least at indicators that there is something missing and then use that as a compass as to in which direction to look in order to get closer to the whole story.
On the PCA above, Basques are quite distinct from Early Neolithic, Middle Neolithic and Copper Age Iberians (marked Iberia_EN, Iberia_MN and Iberia_CA, respectively), because they are significantly more eastern. In fact, they cluster with the only Bronze Age Iberian on the plot (Iberia_BA), which is the same individual that I found to harbor steppe-related ancestry.