What Language Group (Or Proto-Language group) Did West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) Belong To?

[Peterski]

Some sort of very early proto-IE was probably spoken in the Dnieper-Donets culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper...Donets_culture

The family of languages most closely related to IE, is Uralic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf...-030514-124812

The strongest geographic indicator of the location where PIE was spoken is the fact that PIE and Proto-Uralic (PU) appear to have been geographic neighbors. They had core vocabulary items that look suspiciously similar ('name', 'water') and similar-looking pronouns (Ringe 1997; Janhunen 2000, 2001; Koivulehto 2001; Kallio 2001; Salminen 2001; Witzel 2003; Parpola 2012). One kind of relationship between PIE and PU that would account for the apparently shared pronouns, noun endings, and basic vocabulary would be ancestral: The two protolanguages could have shared a very ancient common ancestor, perhaps a broadly related set of intergrading dialects spoken by hunters at the end of the Pleistocene.

Such location of PIE is also confirmed by this video lecture:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...648#post458648

[Peterski]

Do you think it was a neolithic language related to Basque?

Not really.

The Nostratic family of languages was ancestral to Indo-European, Uralic, Kartvelian and Altaic:

(...) Nostratic is a macrofamily, or hypothetical large-scale language family, that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents. In its more restricted, current form, it includes the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Kartvelian languages. (...)

So the areas of Eastern Europe, North-Western Asia, Caucasus Mountains, North-Central Asia.

And within the Nostratic family, Proto-Indo-European was most closely related to Proto-Uralic.

[Peterski]

BTW - regarding this:

Haplogroup I is the oldest major haplogroup in Europe

Haplogroup I probably entered Europe with the Gravettian culture which expanded into Europe some 33,000 years ago, after crossing the Caucasus. Before that there were people of the Aurignacian culture in Europe, and they belonged to haplogroup C1 (C-F3393 and its downstream clades). Then there is also R1a and R1b which were as well indigenous haplogroups of Eastern European hunters, as ancient DNA evidence shows.

The earliest ancient DNA evidence of C1 in Eastern Europe is from 38,700-36,200 years ago (Kostenki 14 indivudal, buried near Voronezh in European part of Russia), and then we have also C1a2 from Spain (La-Brana hunter), which is 8,000-7,700 years old. C1 was in Europe first, then I and R1 entered. Some groups of N1c could also be present among North-East European hunters, but there is so far no clear evidence in aDNA.