What if the peoples of Aquitania, who are believed to be the descendents of the modern Basques...
I think you mean "ancestors" don't you?
Best,
Didn't DNA testing show remarkable similarities between Northern Spaniards and Irish/Welsh? Including Basques as well (not just their terrorist links!).
Also, this link provides some information about the topic.
According to the DNA, there was just one other significant event in the repopulation of northern Europe, and that was the settlement of Ireland at the very end of the Ice Age by seafarerers from northwestern Spain or Portugal (green arrows). These bold sailors might have been making regular stops at the unglaciated southern tip of Ireland for many thousands of years -- it would have been the natural jumping-off place if they really did cross the Atlantic to establish the Clovis culture. But it was only after the ice retreated fully and the land became green and inviting that they were able to put down roots and take up permanent residence around the shores of the Irish Sea.
A century ago, when the Indo-Europeans were regarded as Bronze Age chariot-warriors from the steppes, it seemed obvious that the Celts must have originated near the eastern end of their historic range and spread westward, probably reaching England well after the era of Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments. The Neolithic hypothesis modified this scenario slightly by starting the expansion a few centuries earlier and bringing the Celts to England late in the megalithic period, but it maintained the idea of a relatively recent eastern origin. This had the undesirable result of leaving the Celts kicking their heels aimlessly in some unidentified corner of central Europe for thousands of years, but there seemed to be no better alternative.
Recently, however, the notion of an east-to-west expansion for the Celts has broken down completely in the light of genetic analysis. The primary factor arguing against it is that there turns out to be an extremely sharp dividing line between the Y-chromosome DNA of the Celtic-speakers of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland and that of the English, French, and Germans -- a dividing line that has remained constant ever since northern Europe was resettled at the end of the Ice Age. In fact, the DNA of the insular Celts is so specialized that there seems to be no possibility of any later arrivals, not even to the limited degree that might be found in the case of elite conquest.
These findings have recently inspired archaologists like Professor Barry Cunliffe of Oxford to offer the revisionist view that the spread of the Celtic languages proceeded not from east to west, but from west to east. He believes that this expansion was originally propelled by the enormous prestige of the navigators and astronomer-priests who carried the megalithic culture of Ireland to England, France and southern Germany a couple of thousand years before the Celts' final brief period of military dominance. If this theory is correct, then the Celtic homeland must have been in precisely the areas around the Irish Sea where Celtic languages are still spoken today.
One additional piece of evidence in support of Cunliffe's ideas comes in the form of what is known as the "Old European hydronymy," a seemingly exotic phrase which simply refers to the system of river-names in the region. River-names are important in the study of prehistory because they tend to be retained even when the local language changes. (Think about how how many rivers in America still bear Indian names like Mississippi or Housatonic.)
Many of the ancient river names of Germany, France, and England -- such as "Rhine," "Rhone," and "Thames" -- appear to arise from a common system of naming, and although these names are Celtic in form, they do not appear to be Celtic in origin. There has been a great deal of lively argument as to what this "Old European" language might have been, but it is widely accepted that it was probably Indo-European and most likely an early form of Germanic.
However, even if the Celts did spread eastward from Ireland and western Britain, those areas could only have been only a secondary staging point. The original Celtic homeland has to have been located in the west of the Iberian peninsula, the source of those seafarers who settled Ireland at the tail end of the Ice Age. Irish DNA gives powerful testimony to this -- it is almost identical to that of the Basques, who would have been their immediate neighbors before the northward migration.
There is linguistic evidence for this migration as well, in the form of an obscure but apparently Indo-European language called Lusitanian, which the Romans encountered when they colonized western Iberia. The handful of surviving inscriptions in this language suggest that it had distant Celtic affinities, and yet it was not at all similar to the Celtiberian languages of central Spain, which had arrived from France as part of the recent Celtic expansion. It seems quite possible that Lusitanian was a survivor of the proto-Celtic spoken in the late Ice Age.
Didn't DNA testing show remarkable similarities between Northern Spaniards and Irish/Welsh? Including Basques as well (not just their terrorist links!).
I've been to Galicia and Asturias, they're quite proud of their celtic heritage. The castro forts are quite similar to our ringforts as well. Our legends have that "Miles Hispania" set sail from Galicia to land in Kerry so there is that link.
I'm diverging though! I just remembered seeing a documentry where Basque/Irish showed a remarkable similarity in chromosomes or something in DNA.
.... The Basques are one of the great enigmas of western europe, seeing a larger and more defined Basque state in an ATL would be cool.