One of the strangest chapters in history. A lost culture, actually a lost race was discovered in the 15th century living off the coast of Morocco on the Canary Islands. To the utter surprise of the invading Spaniards, who were on their way to conquer the Americas, the people the encountered were light-skinned, many had blue and green eyes and blonde or red hair.
The Spaniards were soon shocked to discover that the tongue they spoke was unrelated to any known European language. These were a people apart, an outlier culture.
The story begins in 1402, when the Castilian conquest of the Canary islands began, with the expedition of French explorers Jean Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle. They were nobles and vassals of Henry III of Castile; the pair originally sailed to the Canary Island of Lanzarote.
From there, they conquered the islands of Fuerteventura (1405) and El Hierro. Béthencourt received the title King of the Canary Islands, but still recognized King Henry III as his overlord. Though the Canaries were populated by a culturally and racially unified people, each island was isolated from the others.
Oddly enough, the Guanche, as they called themselves, were not a seafaring people even though they inhabited a chain of islands. Unlike most islanders worldwide, they were not fishermen, but farmers. This was a curious twist to the Spaniards. One they had no explanation for.
In fact, though they spoke the same language, the natives of one island could not understand the inhabitants of the other islands. They had been disconnected for so long their dialects were that different. Since the populations, of the islands were small and isolated, it made it easy for the Spaniards to defeat them militarily, for the most part, on those first forays. But not so easy therafter it took many decades for the invaders to conquer their fierce warriors.
These white native islanders had customs completely alien to the Spaniards. They built pyramids and the mummified their dead. In fact, they did so using the methods and practices of the Egyptians.
So, who were these people and where did they come from? This has puzzled historians for a long time and the topic is controversial and the theories much disputed. In fact, I have investigated their ABO blood type results and their mtDNA, as well. Perhaps not surprisingly the Guanche had a distinctive genetic signature, unlike Europeans. They had a very high frequency of type O, especially Rh-negative.
In addition, their possessed their own mtDNA signature that emerged on the islands and nowhere else in the world. In the following insert we see an example of the mummified remains of an indigenous Guanche woman.
The photo establishes beyond any doubt that the Guanche, the indigenous population of these islands, were proto-Caucasian. She has red hair. Also, that they were not related to Indo-European cultures since none of the latter mummified their dead.
No European culture mummified their dead; also as noted, in passing above, the Guanche had a language that was alien to the Spaniards. They could not relate it to any known European tongue.
Modern linguists, however, have established that it is related to Amazigh, the language of the Berbers who inhabit North Africa from Morocco to Egypt. )Another outlier culture that historians keep quiet about)
We shall go into all of that in a later post. Here we should note that the sketchy histories passed down by the Romans and Greeks, through supposed legends and myths, often contain kernels of truth. Their historians mentioned a strange people on the Canary Islands.
Now, let us consider that these seven islands are right in the general region that Plato described Atlantis had once bordered. Does it not make perfect sense to find such an unusual, outlier peoples? It surely does. Where else was their a lost and unknown European- looking people in the world? A culture that built pyramids and mummified their dead...no less.
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