I'm not really interested in the subject, but I thought this would be a great opportunity to test your skills a cutting through the clutter and bullsh1t that White people often pass-off as history.
posted
Universal geography : or a description of all parts of the world, on a new plan, according to the great natural divisions of the globe; accompanied with analytical, synoptical, and elementary tables (1824)
Author: M. Malte-Brun, 1775-1826
What has become of the Gaunches, whose mummies alone, buried in caverns, have escaped destruction ? In the 15th century, some commercial nations, especially the Spa- niards and Portuguese, came in search of slaves to the Ca- nary Islands, as they afterwards did to the coast of Gui- nea. Under the Guanches, the Arcliipelago of the Cana- ries was divided into several small states, hostile to each other, and the interest of Europeans kept up their intes- tine wars, for the sake of purchasing the prisoners^ many
of them preferred death to slavery, and killed themselves and their children. It is in this manner that the popu tion of the Canaries had suffered considerably by the com- merce of slaves, by the rapine of pirates, and particularly by a continued slaughter at the time tliat Alonzo de Lu- go made a conquest of them. Such of the Guanches as remained, perished in 1494, in the famous plague called modorraf which was attributed to the number of dead bo- dies left by the Spaniards exposed to the air after the battle of Laguna. This fine nation of Guanches was almost ex- tinct at the commencement of the seventeenth century; a few old men only were found at Candelaria and Guimar. At this time, there does not exist throughout the Archi- pelago one native of the pure race. Some Canarian fami- lies boast of their relationship to the last shepherd king of Guimar; but these pretensions do not rest on very solid foundations; they are occasionally renewed, whenever a man more tawny than his neighbours is anxious to solicit the rank of officer in the service of the king of Spain.
The Guanches, celebrated for their tall figure, and often conspicuous for fine fair hair, have furrnished excellent sub- jects for the pen of historians discontented with the age: and a short time after the discovery of America, they were fond of celebrating the generous virtues of the Guanches, as they have in our time extolled the innocent mildness of the islanders of Otaheite, or as Tacitus has traced his se- ducing account of the Germans. In fact, if the Guanches offer some physical analogy with the colossal aborigines of ancient Germany, they appear to have resembled, in some respects, the Otaheitans.
The mummics of this nation, seen in the cabinets of Eu- Guanches; are brought from sepulchral caverns cut in the rock, on the eastern declivity of the Peak of Teneriffe. The an- cient Guanches, after having deposited in these catacombs a sufficient number of bodies, took the precaution of shut- ting the entrance, and it is asserted that tiie knowledge of these burial places was a secret transmitted exclusively to certain families.These mummies, at present very rare in the Canaries themselves, are in so extraordinary a state of dryness, that the entire body, covered with its integu- ments, does not often weigh more than six or seven pounds; that is, a third less than the skeleton of an individual of the same size, recently cleared of its muscles. The cra- nium, in its form, has some resemblance to that of the white race of the ancient Egyptians; and the incisor teeth are blunted among the Guanches, as in the mum- mies found on the borders of the Nile. But this form of teeth is due to art alone; and, on a careful examination of the physiognomy of the ancient Canarians, skilful ana- tomists have observed in the zygomatic bones, and in the lower jaw, very sensible difterences from the Egyptian mummies.
On opening those of the Guanches, remains aromatic plants are found, among which is constantly observed the Chenopodium ambrosioides. The bodies are of ten ornamented with fillets, to which are suspended small disks of baked earth, that appear to have been used as nu- merical signs, and resemble the quippos of the Peruvians, Mexicans, and Chinese.
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The Guanches were the ancient dwellers of the island of Tenerife, since way before the Spanish conquest. Due to the extension of the islands the other inhabitants of the Canary Islands are also named so.
The Guanches are described as tall men, with heights between 1m 75 cm. and 1m 82 cm., well developed, with huge, thick bones, which indicates that they were very strong, many of them had blue eyes and blond hair. The first descriptions of the ancient dwellers of Tenerife appear in the charts of Niccolosso da Recco (1341).
The name Guanche comes from a Spanish deformation of the language spoken on the island by the ancient people, which was an archaic phase of the modern day Berber. The island’s natives referred to themselves with the words “ Wa n Chinet” which meant “the man of Chinet “, Chinet being the name of the island in their tongue. Today that language is called Guanche and is also applied to the dwellers of the island of Tenerife.
The Guanches were of Berber origin and they arrived between the V century B.C. and the beginning of the Christian Era. Due to the fact that there are no archaeological findings of the existence of some kind of sea craft, nor any knowledge of navigational skills, it is supposed that they were brought in successive waves by Phoenician sailors with commercial aims and later abandoned on the island until the XV century.
Their origin seems to be from more than one Berber tribe, they brought with them their domestic animals such as goats, sheep, pigs and dogs, as well as wheat, peas and barley, each one adding to the group of dwellers that, with a common origin, gave way to different cultural layers.
Pyramids
Pyramidal constructions can be found in Santa Bárbara and in La Mancha in Icod de los Vinos, forming a group of eight pyramids, of which the tallest was the Pirámide de La Mancha, that was destroyed by the building of a highway, leaving only the smaller constructions and the Pyramid complex (conjunto Piramidal) of Chacona in Guimar forming an ensemble of nine pyramids of which only five remain. All these pyramid constructions are stepped, similar to the pyramids built by the Mayas and Aztecs in Central America.
The first invaders
In the Early Middle Ages there started to arrive explorers, sailors, and European conquerors to the Canary shores, starting a historic process that would end in the archipelago’s joining the realm of Castalia at the end of the XV century.
In the first century, the Roman historian Plinius described the Canary Islands through an expedition sent by Juba, king of Mauritania. From the second half of the XIII century, successive waves of Europeans arrived (Genovese, Portuguese and Castilians) that stole livestock, made lonely shepherds prisoners to sell off as slaves in the far off Europe.
In 1335 a ship with Guanche prisoners as slaves arrived at Lisbon. Later in 1341 a fleet of ships chartered by the King of Portugal and with a Florentine, Genovese and Spanish crew reached the Canary Islands, returning to Lisbon five months later laden with interesting merchandise, among them Guanches as slaves. In the following years the Canary Islands became a favourite spot where the sailors of different nations went slave hunting.
The second invaders
At the beginning of the XV century, the Realm of Castalia commenced the conquest of the Canary Islands.
In 1402 this colonisation of the Islands also included the French Juan de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle. Among the crew were the French priests Pedro Bontier and Jean Le Verrier who together wrote the first chronicles on the Canary Islands conquest and titled it Le Canarien.
The island of Lanzarote was first conquered in 1402, later on, in 1478 the Castilians conquered Fuerteventura, El Hierro and La Gomera, and in this same year the Catholic Kings ordered the Adelantado Alonso Fernández de Lugo to continue with the conquest of the Islands.
In 1478, after a heroic resistance, the conquest of Gran Canaria was achieved, while in 1493 after fierce battles, La Palma was conquered also. In 1494, the Castilians decide to conquer Tenerife. In the struggles fought out during the conquest, the most notable were the Battle of Acentejo (Batalla de Acentejo), which was the first battle lost by the Spanish Army to the Guanches. The village where this battle raged is known as the Slaughter of Acentejo (Matanza de Acentejo).
The final battle of victory, in which the conquerors defeated the Guanches, took place in a village named La Victoria, and to remember their victory the conqueror planted a pine tree that exists to this day.
After two years of intense struggle, Tenerife surrendered in 1496, and the place where the warriors (menceyatos de guerra) surrendered was in Los Realejos. The conquest of the Canary Islands finally ended in 1497
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The Roman author and military officer, Pliny the Elder, drawing upon the accounts of Juba II, king of Mauretania, stated that a Mauretanian expedition to the islands around 50 BC found the ruins of great buildings, but otherwise no population to speak of. If this account is accurate, it may suggest that the Guanches were not the only inhabitants, or the first ones; or that the expedition simply did not explore the islands thoroughly.
Strictly speaking, the Guanches were the indigenous peoples of Tenerife, where the population seems to have lived in relative isolation up to the time of the Castilian conquest, around the 14th century (though Genoans, Portuguese, and Castilians may have visited there from the second half of the 8th century onwards). The name came to be applied to the original populations of Tenerife island.
Many Guanches died resisting the new colonizers, while others died from infectious diseases that accompanied the invaders, diseases to which the Guanches, because of their long isolation, had little immunity.
What remains of their language, Guanche—a few expressions, vocabulary words and the proper names of ancient chieftains still borne by certain families—exhibits positive similarities with the Berber languages. The first reliable account of Guanche language was provided by Genovese explorer Nicoloso da Recco in 1341, with a translation of numbers used by the islanders.
Petroglyphs attributed to various Mediterranean civilizations have been found on some of the islands. In 1752, Domingo Vandewalle, a military governor of Las Palmas, attempted to investigate them, and Aquilino Padron, a priest at Las Palmas, catalogued inscriptions at El Julan, La Candía and La Caleta on El Hierro. In 1878 Dr. R. Verneau discovered rock carvings in the ravines of Las Balos that resemble Libyan or Numidic writing from the time of Roman occupation or earlier. In other locations, Libyco-Berber script has been identified. However, according to European chroniclers, the Guanches did not possess a system of writing at the time of conquest.
The geographic accounts of Pliny the Elder and of Strabo mention the "fortunate islands" but do not report anything about their populations. Accounts about the Guanche population were first made around 1150 AD 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, Portugal. 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" (probably the Sargasso Sea), the Mugharrarin moved back and first reached an uninhabited Island (Madeira or Hierro), where they found "a huge quantity of sheeps the meat of which was bitter and uneatable" 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 hair 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. Apart from the marvelous and fanciful content of this history, this account would suggest that Guanches had sporadic contacts with populations from the mainland.
Genetic evidence shows that northern African peoples (most likely descendants of the Capsian culture) made a significant contribution to the aboriginal population of the Canaries following desertification of the Sahara at some point after 6000 BC. Linguistic evidence suggests ties between Guanche language and the Berber languages of northern Africa, particularly when comparing numeral systems. Research into the genetics of the Guanche population have led to the conclusion that they share an ancestry with Berber peoples.
The islands were visited by a number of peoples within recorded history. The Numidians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians knew of the islands and made frequent visits, including expeditions dispatched from Mogador by Juba. The Romans occupied northern Africa and visited the Canaries between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, judging from Roman artefacts found on the island of Lanzarote. These show that Romans did trade with the Canaries, though there is no evidence of their ever settling there. Archaeology of the Canaries seem to reflect diverse levels of technology, some differing from the Neolithic culture that was encountered at the time of conquest.
A 2003 genetics research article by Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. published in the European Journal of Human Genetics compared aboriginal Guanche mtDNA (collected from Canarian archaeological sites) to that of today's Canarians and concluded that, "despite the continuous changes suffered by the population (Spanish colonisation, slave trade), aboriginal mtDNA [direct maternal] lineages constitute a considerable proportion [42 – 73%] of the Canarian gene pool. Although the Berbers are the most probable ancestors of the Guanches, it is deduced that important human movements [e.g., the Islamic-Arabic conquest of the Berbers] have reshaped Northwest Africa after the migratory wave to the Canary Islands" and the "results support, from a maternal perspective, the supposition that since the end of the 16th century, at least, two-thirds of the Canarian population had an indigenous substrate, as was previously inferred from historical and anthropological data." mtDNA haplogroup U subclade U6b1 is Canarian-specific[12] and is the most common mtDNA haplogroup found in aboriginal Guanche archaeological burial sites.
Both the study done by Maca-Meyer et al (2003) on Tenerife aborigines and the study done by Fregel et al (2009) on La Palma aborigines found the majority of mt-DNA haplogroups belonging to the Eurasian clades such as H/HV/U*/R. The study done by Maca-Meyer et al (2003) on Tenerife Aborigines used a total sample of 71 aborigines and found that the frequency of the Cambridge Reference Sequence Cambridge Reference Sequence(CRS) which belongs to the European haplogroup H2a2 was 21.12% of the total sample. Meanwhile the same study Maca-Meyer et al(2003)found out that frequencies of haplogroups H/HV/U*/R(-CRS) at 30.98% of the total; also mtDNA haplogroup V was observed at frequencies of 4.23% of the total sample."
Y-DNA, or Y-chromosomal, (direct paternal) lineages were not analyzed in this study; however, an earlier study giving the aboriginal y-DNA contribution at 6% was cited by Maca-Meyer et al., but the results were criticized as possibly flawed due to the widespread phylogeography of y-DNA haplogroup E1b1b1b, which may skew determination of the aboriginality versus coloniality of contemporary y-DNA lineages in the Canaries. Regardless, Maca-Meyer et al. states that historical evidence does support the explanation of "strong sexual asymmetry...as a result of a strong bias favoring matings between European males and aboriginal females, and to the important aboriginal male mortality during the Conquest." The genetics thus suggests the native men were sharply reduced in numbers due to the war, large numbers of Spaniard men stayed in the islands and married the local women, the Canarians adopted Spanish names, language, and religion, and in this way, the Canarians were Hispanicized.
According to a 2005 study, in spite of the geographic nearness between the Canary Islands and Morocco, the genetic heritage of the Canary islands male lineages, is mainly from European origin. Indeed, nearly 72% of the haplogroups resulting from are Euro–Eurasian (R1a, R1b, I and G). Unsurprisingly the Spanish conquest brought the genetic base of the current male population of the Canary Islands. Nevertheless, the second most important Haplogroup family is from Africa, Near and Middle East. E1b1b (12% including 7% of the typically berber haplogroup E-M81), E1b1a (2%), J (10%) and T (3%) Haplogroups are present at a rate of 27%. Even if a part of these "eastern" haplogroups were introduced by the Spanish too, we can suppose that a good portion of this rate was already there at the time of the conquest.
According to Fregel et al. 2009 the presence of autochthonous North African E-M81 lineages, and also other relatively abundant markers (E-M78 and J-M267) from the same region in the indigenous Guanche population, "strongly points to that area [North Africa] as the most probable origin of the Guanche ancestors". In this study, Fregel et al. estimated that, based on Y-chromosome and mtDNA haplogroup frequencies, the relative female and male indigenous Guanche contributions to the present-day Canary Islands populations was respectively of 41.8% and 16.1%.
It is thought that the arrival of the aborigines to the archipelago led to the extinction of some big reptiles and insular mammals, for example, the giant lizard Gallotia goliath (which managed to reach up to a meter in length) and Canariomys bravoi, the giant rat of Tenerife.
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Man alTakruri, This forum has missed your posts. I know you are putting in work over at the other website, but please don't forget the original website.
You could shed some light about Africa that is much needed.
Peace
Posts: 9651 | From: Reace and Love City. | Registered: Oct 2005
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Thanks mike, I reread them all, and i learnt more , the map was also useful.
Altakruri, what do you mean by "on record"? Do you mean what they is recorded of their language? If yes, then linguist believe that language belongs to Berber language, other relate it to other languages. But linguistically, Guanche languages are classified as Berber language.
Posts: 883 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Right now this site is tolerable. When sophmoric trolling predominates I have to absent myself or wind up writing stuff I'll be ashamed of later.
Man alTakruri, This forum has missed your posts. I know you are putting in work over at the other website, but please don't forget the original website.
You could shed some light about Africa that is much needed.
Peace
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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Samples of Gaunche speech were recorded when Euros came in contact with them. They reveal whether the Gaunche were speakers of a taMazight lect or not.
quote:Originally posted by Mazigh:
Altakruri, what do you mean by "on record"? Do you mean what they is recorded of their language?
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In any case, their language was not identic to any Berber language. However, it was a distinct Berber language according to its classification. Many words are related to the Berber language (proto-Berber).
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, the map was also useful. 
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