Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
The colonisation of the Canaries
In 1418, Captain ‘One-eyed’ Zarco sailed out from Lisbon to plant the flag of Portugal on the islands first of Porto Santo and then of Madeira. In doing so, he not only claimed for Portugal a useful harbour and a staging post that would enable explorations further out into the Atlantic – first to the Azores and then to Brazil – he also secured a fertile, well-wooded, and well-watered island where sugar cane flourished, making Madeiran landowners and the Portuguese Crown extremely rich for a century by selling ‘white gold’ through the markets of Venice, London, and Antwerp.
It was Portugal’s good fortune that they faced no resistance to their claim to have ‘discovered’ Madeira. Though the islands were long known to sailors (Plutarch called them ‘the Isles of the Blest’ in AD 75, and they are clearly identifiable on a map of 1351 in the Laurentian Library in Florence), since there was no indigenous population, the first settlers had a free hand in exploiting the islands’ rich natural resources.
Not so the Spanish, who officially ‘conquered’ the Canary Islands in 1402, but then fought a bitter and long-drawn-out war with the earlier inhabitants of the archipelago, not securing absolute control until 1496. Those inhabitants – the so-called ‘Guanche’ people – have hitherto been little studied or understood, but researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have recently published a paper on the chronology of the human colonisation of the Canary Islands (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302924121) that has thrown new light on their arrival in the archipelago.
These findings confirm that the Romans were indeed, as Pliny wrote (in c.AD 77), the first to visit the ‘Purple Islands’. In his Natural History, Pliny reports on his conversations with sailors who accurately described Mount Teide, on Tenerife, as being ‘capped by perpetual snow and wrapped in cloud’. He claimed, less credibly, that Canaria (Gran Canaria) was named for ‘its multitude of dogs of a huge size’. He mentions the abundance of fruit (especially dates), of lizards and birds of every kind, and of fish, but also ‘the rotting carcasses of monstrous creatures that are constantly being cast ashore by the sea’, which sounds like the phenomenon of beaching whales and dolphins.
On the Islote de Lobos, located 2km north of the island of Fuerteventura, archaeologists have now found physical evidence of Roman settlement. Since 2013 they have been excavating a purple-dye production workshop, complete with houses, pottery, tools, and the typical artefacts of Roman daily life, with a date range spanning the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD. From the shell middens associated with the settlement it looks as if rock snails, or murex, were being processed to produce the costly fabric dye known as imperial purple, though the sap of the indigenous dragon trees might have been used for the same purpose.
Previous estimates have put the Guanche arrival sometime in the 1st millennium AD and suggested that the Romans traded with an existing population, but the latest analysis shows that there was no overlap between the Roman and Guanche dates, so the research team has stated that the two populations did not live simultaneously in the islands. Instead, Berber groups from western North Africa first set foot on one of the eastern islands (probably Fuerteventura) sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, after which they spread rapidly throughout the archipelago – testament to their advanced nautical skills, not just to reach the Canaries across a 108km stretch of open ocean but also for navigating between the islands. This is not surprising when you consider that the people of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean were travelling about by boat and trading widely across the region at the time.
European travellers frequently visited the Canaries in the decades before Spain embarked on a campaign of conquest: the Genoese explorer Nicoloso da Recco made records of the language used by the islanders, and the abundant rock-carved inscriptions show an affinity with Libyan or Numidian script dating from the time of the Roman occupation of North Africa.
Neanderthal genocide
It was once thought that warfare and disease led to the extinction of the Guanche people, but ancient DNA extracted from the mummified remains of ancient Canarians and compared with modern DNA suggests that some Canary Islanders derive up to a third of their DNA from Guanche ancestors. Could the same be true of Neanderthals – that rather than dying out as a species, people of Neanderthal ancestry continue to live among us?
Much research time and effort has been devoted in recent years to answering the question, ‘what caused Neanderthal extinction?’, with theories that include their inferior language abilities (based on analysing their tongues and throats), their susceptibility to disease, their isolation from each other preventing reproduction, or being outcompeted for food by Homo sapiens. Dating of the ‘extinction’ to c.40,000 years ago even calls into question whether Neanderthals and H sapiens actually co-existed in western and northern Europe.
Perhaps all this ingenuity deployed in an attempt to prove that H sapiens did not commit genocide was not necessary: scientific opinion is beginning to ask whether Neanderthals were simply assimilated into H sapiens society, with their contribution to the H sapiens genome steadily diminishing over time. Professor Chris Stringer, the Natural History Museum’s Research Leader in Human Evolution, first raised this possibility in a paper published with colleague Dr Lucile Crété in the journal PaleoAnthropology in 2022 (https://doi.org/10.48738/2022.iss2.130). It is an idea that is gaining traction.
According to the authors, ‘our knowledge of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has got more complex in the last few years, but it’s still rare to see scientific discussion of how the interbreeding between the groups actually happened. We propose that this behaviour could have led to the Neanderthals’ extinction if they were regularly breeding with H sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared. [We suggest] that a continuing absorption of Neanderthal individuals into H sapiens groups could have been one of the factors that led to the demise of the Neanderthals’.
It is an attractive idea and a logical extension of what even Professor Stringer once thought impossible: the gene flow that occurred between H neanderthalensis and H sapiens that has left modern Asians and Europeans with c.2% of Neanderthal genetic ancestry.
The 15-minute city
Another attractive idea is that of the 15-minute city promoted by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, whereby citizens should be able to access all the resources they need in life within a 15-minute radius of their home – including workspace, shops and markets, schools and healthcare services, cultural and entertainment venues, places of worship, and green spaces. Opponents of the idea have branded it as anti-car (others argue that rejecting car supremacy is a key benefit) and have talked of ‘imprisoning’ and controlling people for sinister ends.
Giving the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Newnham College, Cambridge, earlier this year, Professor Augusta McMahon showed that the elements of the 15-minute city were already present in the world’s earliest urban settlements – those of ancient Mesopotamia – where the inhabitants enjoyed home, work, and social spaces all within the same neighbourhood. Using material evidence from excavations, such as spindle whorls discarded in local rubbish tips, Professor McMahon reinterpreted what had previously been described as textile workshops employing many people under institutional management as places where wool was prepared for distribution to spinners and weavers who worked from home while herding, watching over children, or socialising with neighbours.
Streets were narrow and meandering, rather than grid-based, limiting through traffic and supporting privacy. They incorporated small squares, shrines, markets, and access to water. If all of this sounds a little too idyllic, Professor McMahon made it clear that cities in the ancient world could be crowded, noisy, stressful to navigate, unsanitary, unequal, and alienating; but the unpleasant aspects of living in such built-up cities were mitigated by safe places that provided home-employment opportunities and encouraged community encounters and shared activity, as well as collective responsibility for the safety of dependants, for street-cleaning, and for property-maintenance.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
