Canary Islands
Canary Islands
Pre-conquest exploration
Canary Islands in pre-colonial times
The geographic accounts of Pliny the Elder and of Strabo mention the Fortunate Isles but do not report anything about their populations. An account of the Guanche population may have been made around AD 1150 by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in the Nuzhatul Mushtaq, a book he wrote for King Roger II of Sicily, in which al-Idrisi reports a journey in the Atlantic Ocean made by the Mugharrarin ("the adventurers"), a family of Andalusian seafarers from Lisbon.
The only surviving version of this book, kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and first translated by Pierre Amédée Jaubert, reports that, after having reached an area of "sticky and stinking waters", the Mugharrarin moved back and first reached an uninhabited Island (Madeira or Hierro), where they found "a huge quantity of sheep, which its meat was bitter and inedible" and, then, "continued southward" and reached another island where they were soon surrounded by barks and brought to "a village whose inhabitants were often fair haired with long and flaxen hair and the women of a rare beauty". Among the villagers, one did speak Arabic and asked them where they came from.
Then the king of the village ordered them to bring them back to the continent where they were surprised to be welcomed by Berbers.[8] Apart from the marvelous and fanciful content of this history, this account would suggest that Guanches had sporadic contacts with populations from the mainland. Al-Idrisi also described the Guanche men as tall and of a reddish-brown complexion.
Free | Noble Man
Berbers | Amazigh
Some proportion of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands are descended from the aboriginal Guanches—usually considered to have been Berber—among whom a few Canary Islander customs, such as the eating of gofio, originated.
While Berbers are stereotyped as nomads, and indeed some tribes are, the majority are typically farmers. It is difficult to estimate the number of Berbers in the world today, because many do not define themselves as Berber. However the Berber language is spoken by an estimated 14 to 25 million people.
The Berbers have lived in North Africa for thousands of years and their presence has been recorded as early as 3000 B.C.E. Greeks, Romans, and ancient Egyptians have indicated the presence of Berbers in their records.[1] There is no complete certitude about the origin of the Berbers; however, various disciplines shed light on the matter.
In general, genetic evidence appears to indicate that most northwest Africans (whether they consider themselves Berber or Arab) are predominantly of Berber origin, and that populations ancestral to the Berbers have been in the area since the Upper Paleolithic era. The genetically predominant ancestors of the Berbers appear to have come from East Africa, the Middle East, or both—but the details of this remain unclear. However, significant proportions of both the Berber and Arabized Berber gene pools derive from more recent human migration of various Italic, Semitic, Germanic, and sub-Saharan African peoples, all of whom have left their genetic footprints in the region.
The Neolithic Capsian culture appeared in North Africa around 9,500 B.C.E. and lasted until possibly 2700 B.C.E. Linguists and population geneticists alike have identified this culture as a probable period for the spread of an Afro-Asiatic language (ancestral to the modern Berber languages) to the area. The origins of the Capsian culture, however, are archeologically unclear. Some have regarded this culture's population as simply a continuation of the earlier Mesolithic Ibero-Maurusian culture, which appeared around 22,000 B.C.E., while others argue for a population change; the former view seems to be supported by dental evidence.
(Click the map to see enlarged)
Berber
Berber
Ancient mtDNA analysis and the origin of the Guanches
The prehistoric colonisation of the Canary Islands by the Guanches (native Canarians) woke up great expectation about their origin, since the Europeans conquest of the Archipelago. Here, we report mitochondrial DNA analysis (HVRI sequences and RFLPs) of aborigine remains around 1000 years old. The sequences retrieved show that the Guanches possessed U6b1 lineages that are in the present day Canarian population, but not in Africans. In turn, U6b, the phylogenetically closest ancestor found in Africa, is not present in the Canary Islands. Comparisons with other populations relate the Guanches with the actual inhabitants of the Archipelago and with Moroccan Berbers. This shows that, despite the continuous changes suffered by the population (Spanish colonisation, slave trade), aboriginal mtDNA lineages constitute a considerable proportion of the Canarian gene pool. Although the Berbers are the most probable ancestors of the Guanches, it is deduced that important human movements have reshaped Northwest Africa after the migratory wave to the Canary Islands.
The first human settlers that arrived at the Canary Islands do not seem to pre-date the 1st millennium BC.1 Since the incorporation of the Canary Islands to the European world in the 15th century, the origin and survival of these aboriginal inhabitants has been a debatable topic. Population genetic studies on their present day inhabitants, mainly those based on uniparental markers, have given support to the most probable Northwest African Berber origin of the ‘Guanches’, as the native Canarians are generally known. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages such as U6 and Y-chromosome markers as M81, with a Berber origin,2,3 have a significant higher presence in the Canary Islands than in Iberians, the main colonisers of the Islands.4,5
Admixture analysis taking the Iberians, Northwest and West sub-Saharan African populations as parental sources of the actual Canarian population, gave estimates of around 33% for the maternal4 and 6% for the paternal5 Guanche lineages. This strong sexual asymmetry was explained as a result of a strong bias favouring matings between European males and aboriginal females, and to the important aboriginal male mortality during the Conquest.6 However, these results, although congruent with history, are susceptible of criticism. First of all, as the Berber markers are also present in the Iberian Peninsula,7,8,9 drift effects after the Spanish colonisation could justify their higher frequency in the Canary Islands, without invoking aboriginal heritage. Furthermore, after the Conquest, the need of labour led to the introduction of slaves from the Northwest African coast. With time, these slaves were freed and integrated into the island population. This could justify the presence, in the current Canarian gene pool, of a higher amount of Berber markers than the Iberian Peninsula. However, the geographic distribution of the U6 subclades in Africa and the Canary Islands weakens this statement. In Northwest Africa, the predominant subgroup is U6a, which is scarce in the Archipelago.2,4 On the other hand, subgroup U6b is very rare in North Africa, but the sublineage U6b1 is the most prevalent of the U6 subhaplogroup in the Canarian population,4 and has still not been detected in North Africa.2,10,11,12 Certainly, the straight way to confirm the aboriginal contribution, to the current mtDNA gene pool of the Archipelago, would be to check for the presence of this Canarian U6b1 subclade directly on the aboriginal remains of the Islands. Fortunately, the advances in molecular biology have made the retrieval of ancient DNA (aDNA) from archaeological specimens a tenable goal, especially if these remains are probably less than 1000 years old.
https://www.nature.com/articles/5201075
Maca-Meyer, N., Arnay, M., Rando, J. et al. Ancient mtDNA analysis and the origin of the Guanches. Eur J Hum Genet 12, 155–162 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201075
