This "substrate" influenced the vocabulary and structure of the languages that eventually replaced them.

Vennemann posits that starting in the fifth millennium BCE, Atlantic/Semitidic seafaring colonizers (related to Semitic speakers) settled the coastal regions of Western and Northern Europe.

He points to Old European hydronyms (river names) across the continent, which he reinterprets as having Basque-related origins rather than Indo-European ones.

He identifies structural similarities between Insular Celtic languages (like Irish and Welsh) and Semitic/Hamitic languages, such as Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) word order.

Vennemann argues that after the last Ice Age, much of Western and Central Europe was inhabited by speakers of Vasconic languages , of which Basque is the only surviving member.

The toponymic (place-name) links are tenuous and can be explained by other linguistic families.

The comparative method , the gold standard for determining language relationships, does not strongly support these deep-time connections.