Sardinia

cfuserkildare

Is there any sort of general consensus as to just how important the many finds on Sardinia are?

Ipso

Didn’t they retain a non Indo European language (Nuragic) up to Roman times? From a genetics point of view Sardinians are supposed to be the best proxy for old European populations.
So maybe their archaeological record is a good indication of what was going on pre the Indo European spread of the mid bronze age.

dubhthach

Modern Sardinians are perhaps our best modern proxy for what European Neolithic populations are like. Of course it's worth remember that post the Roman conquest they did have gene-flow from mainland Europe as a result they sit basically intermediate between Ötzi and say Italians. Given that the most conservative (as in perserving most features from Latin) Romance language is spoken in Sardinia it points to a long history of potential isolation, particularly on the upland/inland population (where the most conservative of all Sardinian dialects is spoken)

Needless to say the next closest modern European population is the Basque's, which might open up possibility that Basque is a relative of both the Iberian language (spoken until Roman times) and to the Paleo-Sardinian language (Nuragic) and thus a direct continuation of Neolithic speech in western Europe.