More than 1,700 years ago, a man and a woman were buried in two volcanic tubes of Lanzarote alone, outside of any aboriginal cemetery, one in the north and the other in the south. They are two of the oldest human remains in the Canary Islands and have been known for half a century, but it has just been discovered that the first was stabbed and the second, executed.
The magazine 'Quaternary Science Rewiews' publishes this Wednesday the results obtained by six researchers from the company Tibicena, the Canario Museum and the Cabildo of Gran Canaria when reviewing the remains of two individuals who died in Lanzarote between the 3rd and 4th centuries, whose bones have been stored in archaeological collections for decades, since they were found in 1968 and 1977.
The discovery is as 'novel' as it is surprising in scientific terms, since in the case of the male it represents the oldest evidence of the use of a metallic weapon known in the Canary Islands, in times that go back to the first centuries of population of the islands by the Berber peoples who emigrated to them from Africa.
In the Canary Islands there are no metallizable minerals, which explains why the Norman and Castilian conquerors of the 14th and 15th centuries faced warriors armed at those heights of history (end of the Middle Ages) with clubs and other wooden and stone utensils.
If someone perpetrated a murder in Lanzarote around 225 AD with a dagger (as suggested by the marks left on the bones by the stabs), either they used a relic brought to the island from present-day Morocco by its first settlers, or it was a sailor who had just arrived on its coast who had a skirmish with a "local" with fatal results for the latter, point out Verónica Alberto, Teresa Delgado, Marco Moreno and the rest of the authors of this article.
This metallic weapon wound is eight centuries earlier than the oldest of its kind known in the Canary Islands, that of a skull from the 11th-12th century that was severed by a sword. As with the Lanzarote skeleton, that skull has been part of archaeological collections for decades (it was discovered in 1932), but it was only a year ago that the trace of a metallic edge was documented on it.
These two remains point in the same direction: The first Canarians remained on the margins of the rest of the world practically from their arrival on the islands until the arrival of the Europeans in the 14th century, but their isolation must not have been as extreme as the majority scientific current thought until now. The metallic weapons that inflicted those wounds in the 3rd and 11th centuries prove it.
The murdered man was between 25 and 35 years old
The man murdered by a dagger that is not preserved, but that opens new horizons to research on the early days of the colonization of the Canary Islands, was 25 to 35 years old, was tall for the time (measured from 1.75 to 1.81) and probably died by betrayal.
Although a wound on the left wrist suggests that he tried to defend himself, the archaeologists remark that he received at least eight stabs in the back that, due to their position, surely pierced his heart, lungs, liver and a kidney.
Did he crawl dying to the interior of the volcanic tube where he was found in the 20th century, in La Chifletera (Yaiza), or was he buried there, alone? The signs on his bones, say the authors of this work, point to a rapid attack, with great loss of blood and fatal necessity in a very short time.
In their opinion, he was buried, but in an isolated place, perhaps with the purpose of hiding him or subjecting him to some type of ostracism, as the first Canarians used to do, for example, with people sentenced to the death penalty, of which there are several testimonies.
It is not known if that was the case of this man, of whom the entire skeleton appeared, except for the head, next to a braid of red hair about 50 centimeters long. However, it does seem to be the destiny of the woman found in 1977 in Los Jameos del Agua, in Haría, while that volcanic tube was being conditioned for tourist visits in order to shape the dream of César Manrique.
In this case, it is a young woman of 18 to 25 years old, who died around the year 297. Of her only her head is preserved, in which eloquent signs of an execution can be seen, this work points out.
Specifically, the skull has four blunt wounds, the trace of some type of club handled by someone "trained" in what they were doing, in an "act of great cruelty and an excess of physical violence that went beyond the purpose of killing her."
For the researchers, those blows speak of an execution, a punishment of which there are testimonies both in the archaeological records of Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria (the two islands closest to Lanzarote), as well as in the chronicles of the Conquest, but not so old. Was the death penalty a practice that the first Canarians brought with them from their lands of origin?, they ask themselves.
These two bodies -with no more relationship between them than belonging to the same century- speak of a violent past, which corroborates that "the colonization of an island with conditions like those of Lanzarote must have been something dangerous and with high doses of insecurity", the researchers conclude.