The Berber peoples of North Africa arrived in the Canary Islands in the 1st century AD, very shortly after the Romans discovered the islands, but not as deportees or slaves, but in a full-fledged colonization that expanded throughout the archipelago in a single wave.
Who were the first navigators to discover the Canary Islands in antiquity: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans...? Did they settle on the islands or were they just passing through? When did the Berbers, whose genetic heritage is in the DNA of the ancient Canarians, arrive? Did they arrive on their own initiative or by force?
These are questions that have been at the center of the scientific debate about the first population of the Canary Islands and the origin of the peoples that European navigators found on all its islands when they "rediscovered" them at the end of the Middle Ages for decades.
Thirteen researchers from the universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, La Laguna, and Linköping (Sweden) are publishing this Monday in 'PNAS', the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, a comprehensive review of the carbon 14 dating on which the chronology of how the first settlement of the Canary Islands was based.
The bias of charcoal remains and seashells
Its authors, members of the IsoCAN project ('Isolation and Evolution in Oceanic Islands: the human colonization of the Canary Islands'), review all the vestiges that support these datings to rule out those that cannot be attributed without doubt to the presence of humans (for example, charcoal remains that may come from a natural fire) and, above all, to examine them again in the light of "chronometric hygiene" criteria.
It is not the same to date the wood from a tree that could have been hundreds of years old when humans used it in a construction or to light a fire than to do so with the remains of a short-lived or very short-lived living being, such as a grain of cereal or with the remains of a goat found in an archaeological site.
And something similar happens with shells or marine remains that have frequently been used to date the human presence in the Canary Islands: the oceans absorb so much carbon present for centuries in the atmosphere that if a freshly caught sardine were dated today with C14, the test would say that it is 400 years old, explains to EFE the main author of the article, Jonathan Santana, from the ULPGC.
Eliminating these temporal biases and any doubtful vestige from the equation, this team from the ULPGC and the ULL emphasizes that it is clear that the Canary Islands were not colonized by humans in the first millennium BC, as some authors still defend.
It was already in the Common Era and with these years of arrival according to the archaeological record: Lanzarote, between the years 70 and 240; Tenerife, between 155 and 385; El Hierro, between 170 and 330; La Palma, between 245 and 430; Fuerteventura, between 270 and 525; La Gomera, between 275 and 405; and Gran Canaria, between 490 and 530.
Roman and Berber presence overlaps in the 1st century
The beginning of that sequence slightly overlaps with the accredited Roman presence on the Islote de Lobos, which extends from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. Did Rome colonize the islands or did it only exploit its resources on time?
"That is still a matter of debate. Some researchers argue that they established a starting point for colonization based on transferring Berber communities to the archipelago, especially to exploit its coastal natural resources. An alternative interpretation of classical narratives (such as the Norman chronicle 'Le Canarien' from the 15th century) suggests that the Romans deported Berber rebels from North Africa to the Canary Islands as a form of punishment," the authors of this work state.
However, neither Roman historians nor the archaeological record provides evidence of these two theories (and much less of a previous Phoenician or Punic arrival in the Canary Islands).
The authors of this work acknowledge that it cannot be ruled out that the expansion of Rome in the 1st century pushed the peoples of Northwest Africa to emigrate to islands that are 100 kilometers away from the continent, but if so, they emphasize, they undertook this enterprise on their own initiative.
That is, they did not arrive as exiles or slaves, but as settlers and in a very extensive wave in its beginnings, as evidenced by the common genetic substrate of the aboriginal peoples that the Castilians found 1,300 years later during the conquest.
They believe that it was so, explains Jonathan Santana, because once they set foot on Lanzarote, the island that any navigator coming from the north almost naturally reaches, as happened centuries later with the Europeans, they were not satisfied with staying there, but "did not stop" until they settled in all of them.
They also did so with a predefined plan, as evidenced by the fact that they carried seeds of various types of cereal, legumes, and fruit trees such as figs or domestic livestock such as goats, sheep, and pigs that guaranteed their survival on islands that, moreover, only offered them arable land, water, and fishing.
Did they navigate?
What is the theory of forced arrival based on then? On the observation that, once they took the entire archipelago, they remained isolated for centuries, without communication between islands until the return of European navigators at the end of the Middle Ages (14th century). The defenders of the deportation or slavery thesis argue that the ancient Canarians probably did not know how to navigate and that, therefore, their arrival in the Canary Islands "needs" the Romans.
"In the end, that whole thesis is very Eurocentric," replies Jonathan Santana, who wonders if the Berbers were a people settled on a long maritime facade but incapable of developing a technology that has been extended since ancient times throughout the world.
The signatories of this article see it as very unlikely: they are sure that they did navigate and would not be surprised if, if they knew of the existence of the Fortunate Islands, surely through Rome (Pliny the Elder already mentions them by that name in the 1st century), they wanted to go to them.
So, why did they stop navigating, why did they remain isolated? Santana acknowledges that it is still not known for sure, but points out two ideas: first, in ancient times, navigation was only done when it was strictly necessary, when the expected gain compensated for the danger of getting lost or shipwrecked; second, in that the Canarians were not unique: the aborigines of Hawaii also lost contact with the rest of Polynesia once they settled on those islands.
