Roman geographers mention several tribes that lived in what is now called the Basque country, among which “Vascones”, whose ethnonyme is the direct ancestor of the modern “Basques”, but these are hardly more than passing references. It is also possible that the “Aquitains” that appear in Cæsar's Commentarii… also were basquophones. In this case, they would have occupied a much larger area than they do at the moment. The medieval evidence confirms that to a certain extent: Gascony (Vasconia), a sizeable part of southwestern France, is administered during the greater part of the Early Middle Ages by rulers with recognisably Basque names (Sancho, Aznar). Similarly, even if my knowledge of Spanish history is not good enough to elaborate on this, it seems to me that the founders of the kingdom of Navarre also were Vascons. Linguistic studies have also underlined the existence of several Basque toponyms in regions that are nowadays outside of the Basque country. If we put aside the bits of political history we have, the only serious thing we can say about the Basque is that (1) they were there before Romans, Celts and the arrival of Indo-European languages (regardless of your what your opinion is on the process of diffusion of this language) and that (2) Basque used to be spoken over a larger area (probably at least a good part of southwestern France).

As for the ultimate origins of the Basque people, no one really knows. Many people have invented fanciful links with almost every ethnic group in the world, mostly on the basis of linguistic evidence (Caucasians, Berbers, Tibetans…). In my opinion, there are only two convincing theories, which are actually not exclusive. The first one is that Basques (and the Basque language) directly came from the Paleolithic era. Southwestern France is a very active place at that time (actually, the periodisation of the Upper Paleolithic is almost exclusively derived from sites of this area: Magdalenian, Aurignacian, Châtelperronian…), because it was a convenient refuge during the glaciation. It is imaginable that after the end of the last glacial period, these surviving people would have expanded again in the area. The other theory is that Iberians (inhabitants of the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, who were there before the first Celtic — and therefore IE — forays) and Basques are related, or that they speak the same language. This is not impossible, but our knowledge of Iberian language is, to say the least, quite patchy.