I don't know if the posting below (not by me) put on the blog about Fellaheen and Turks in Egypt had answered your question. The person, member yql718, quoted it from an on-line article on genetic affiliations of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands.
I had read previously that there were dark-skinned gaunches at one time as this page pasthound.com also mentions, but I can't think of where. (possibly in Sergi's, The Mediterranean Race...) They were certainly not related to the early Gaunches of the mounds and probably not the Phoenicians or Carthaginians who were also there at one time. See http://www.pasthound.com/topics/Guanches?PHPSESSID=j3i4tdgfiat2g30e6v56rhn0o0
From what I understand the earliest Gaunches and their society are not closely related to modern Gaunches who are basically fair-skinned and related to today's North West Africans. Early physical anthropologists regarded the indigenous Gaunches as extinct, mainly based on their apparent noticeable physical and cultural connection to early prognathous Cro-Magnons and their later mesolithic Long Barrow descendants. Circa 1906, John Harris Stone wrote, "On the Isleta of Gran Canaria I had unearthed the giant skeletons of extinct Gaunches from the resting places of what was now before me...there was no of the neolithic times certainly not paleolithic and yet the antiquity of the mound and the underlying caves was obvious." from Connemara and the Neighboring Spots of Beauty and Interest See also Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment who speaks of the extinct Gaunches.
Although the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were said to have visited or been on the Canary Islands, by the time of the Greek Pliny (1st c.) the Gaunche inhabitants were apparently believed to been nonexistent.
The idea of some ancient white or fair-skinned race of stone age Gaunches and North Africans comes from the unwarranted or misguided notion that early dolichocephalic Cro-Magnons and their descendants in Europe and North Africa were European-looking or ancestral to modern Europeans. This notion developed sometime after the early 1900s. It was not generally believed that the early Cro-Magnons were "whites" before that time since these groups tended to be noticably prognathous possessing "tropical" limb proportions besides being dolichocephalic. But then people like Carleton Coon and Cornevin came along trying to make them into an early "Mediterranean race" ancestral to modern European populations. See the Myth of the Mediterranean Race in Dr. Van Sertima's, Egypt Child of Afric,a for more on early misuse of the Cro-magnon and "Mediterranean race" terminology. At the same time Coon ironically recognized and asserted that dolichocephaly was "no where to be found on a regional basis" among modern Europeans.
I mentioned on another blog what early specialists had concluded. Professor Willis Boughton in 1896, in the text The History of Ancient Peoples 334-337 wrote, “Archeologists have found remains of three races in Europe. Two of these are generally classed as blacks, may be known as the Constant and the Cro-Magnon Race.”
William Ripley in 1899 wrote, “Then began the discoveries of abundant prehistoric remains all over Europe particularly France. These with one accord tended to show that European aborigines of the Stone age were not Mongoloid like the Lapps, after all but the exact opposite. In every detail they resembled rather the dolichocephalic Negroes of Africa." Races of Europe p. 436
Isaac Taylor asserted in 1889, “The importance of the skeleton of the Cro- Magnon type is that in stature, prognathousm and shape of the orbits they exhibit approximation to the negro type more than any other which have been found in Europe.” P. 96 in, The Origin of the Aryans, first published 1889.
It has taken several decades since the likes of Coon who is no longer taken seriously (except by pseudohistorians) for European or Western scholars like Brace using genetic-based cranial and other evidence to debunk the fallacy of a white Cro-Magnon. Thus he wrote, "...the oft repeated European feeling that the Cro-Magnons are ‘us’ is more a product of anthropological folklore than the result of the metric data available from the skeletal remains.” ( “The Questionable contribution of the Neolithic and Bronze Age to European Craniofacial form”, by Loring Brace, Noriko Seguchi, Conrad B. Quintyn, Sherry C. Fox, A. Russell Nelson, Sotiris K. Manolis, by the National Academy of Sciences.)
These Cro-magnon and later mesolithic and most neolithic groups in Europe were also related to early indigenous dolichocephalic North Africans of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic - so from that we can conclude the earliest Gaunches probably looked a lot like ancient indigenous dolichocephalic North Africans.
However, as the article below implied, modern North West Africans are related to modern Gaunches and there has been other African and large European admixture as well.
I think that Brace and other anthropologists have pretty much shown that modern fair-skinned Berbers in Morroco and Algeria as the Kabyles of Tizi Ouzou etc and modern Canary Island inhabitants are closely related to modern Europeans and relatively recent in the Mediterranean region in comparison to ancient Gaunches and Bronze Age North Africans.
Needless to say modern NW Africans and Berber-speakers though they may be called "indigenes" are often represented by non-dolichocephalic European-related peoples of post Bronze Age and even post- Midieval origin. The Rif region for example in Morocco is occupied by groups of people with a percentage of red hair comes close to that present in Ireland. They are most often brachycephals or mesocranic. Less than a 1000 years ago, however, we know the area was occupied by dolichocephalic peoples of Masmuda stock whose largest clan was the Ghomara.
If you read the piece on the Berbers I put up you know that a number of Midieval individuals of Syrian, Iraq and Iran speak of the Masmuda as being "black" which was a name that wasn't used lightly in the Arab language. In other words, the most numerous inhabitants of NW Africa were not long ago very dark-skinned populations, the original Berber-speakers. The same descriptions were used for the Sanhaja, Ketama and Hawara and Luata by Greeks, Romans and earlier later peoples. These same Greeks and Romans who documented Phyrgians, Armeni, Vandali, Alans and Romans lived in "Mauretania" with the Mauri or ancestral Berbers.
The name Mazike or Mazazeces a people that are called "Ethiopians" in Roman sources is of course the root of the later Imazighen or Imoshag a name originally used for the Tuareg and a name which apparenctly has been transferred in recent times to all Berber- speakers of all colors cultures and origins. See my post on the Berbers - European Descriptions of the Original Berbers for references 9on this forum). http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=001694
The below posting was taken from my other posting about the Fellaheen and Turks in Egypt. It was put up in answer to ur question on the Gaunches by someone else with display name yql718. In case you didn't see it I've posted some of it here. ___________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Berbers are a mixed lot. Being a language category their phywical makeup is variable, and can vary from fair skin to dark skin. The study below holds that the pre-European inhabitants of the Canary islands (before the Euro colonization) were of African stock, NW African origin. -----------
snippet
Demographic history of Canary Islands male gene-pool: replacement of native lineages by European
Rosa Fregel1 email, Verónica Gomes2,3 email, Leonor Gusmăo2 email, Ana M González1 email, Vicente M Cabrera1 email, António Amorim2 email and Jose M Larruga1
"The origin and prevalence of the prehispanic settlers of the Canary Islands has attracted great multidisciplinary interest. However, direct ancient DNA genetic studies on indigenous and historical 17th–18th century remains, using mitochondrial DNA as a female marker, have only recently been possible. In the present work, the analysis of Y-chromosome polymorphisms in the same samples, has shed light on the way the European colonization affected male and female Canary Island indigenous genetic pools, from the conquest to present-day times. Results
Autochthonous (E-M81) and prominent (E-M78 and J-M267) Berber Y-chromosome lineages were detected in the indigenous remains, confirming a North West African origin for their ancestors which confirms previous mitochondrial DNA results. However, in contrast with their female lineages, which have survived in the present-day population since the conquest with only a moderate decline, the male indigenous lineages have dropped constantly being substituted by European lineages. Male and female sub-Saharan African genetic inputs were also detected in the Canary population, but their frequencies were higher during the 17th–18th centuries than today. Conclusion
The European colonization of the Canary Islands introduced a strong sex-biased change in the indigenous population in such a way that indigenous female lineages survived in the extant population in a significantly higher proportion than their male counterparts. Background..."
Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic