The chronicles of the Conquest do not even mention them, but they were always there: the original peoples of the Canary Islands had been planting lentils for fifteen centuries, with such fidelity to the varieties that their ancestors brought from Africa that they have survived until the 20th century.
The journal Journal Archeological Science publishes this month the conclusions drawn from sequencing the genome of lentils more than a thousand years old, something that had never been achieved. Specifically, seeds whose DNA has survived the passage of centuries thanks to the prodigious conservation capacity of the pre-Hispanic granaries excavated in the mountains of the interior of Gran Canaria.
The genetic study of these legumes supports one of the most accepted theories about the aboriginal past of the Canary Islands: that of the almost absolute isolation from the outside in which its first inhabitants lived since their Amazigh (Berber) ancestors arrived from North Africa, around the 1st century AD, until European navigators rediscovered the islands in the 14th and 15th centuries.
As had already been seen with barley, another staple food in the diet of the aboriginal Canary Islanders, the record of lentils that has been recovered from the archaeological sites of Gran Canaria does not show any crossbreeding with other varieties from abroad. And it spans from the 7th century to almost the 20th century.
But what's more, those 1,300-year-old lentils are genetically very similar to those sown today in the islands, "which can only be explained by the continuous cultivation of indigenous lentils in the Canary Islands," highlight the authors of the study, led by Jenny Hagenblad, Jacob Morales, Rosa Fregel, and Jonathan Santana.
A treasure preserved from grandmothers to granddaughters
"This demonstrates that the lentils grown today in the Canary Islands descend almost exclusively and directly from those brought to the archipelago almost two millennia ago by its first colonizers, as had already been discovered with barley," they add.
The authors recall that lentils have not only been found in pre-Hispanic sites in Gran Canaria, but also in Fuerteventura (5th to 8th centuries) and La Palma (3rd-13th centuries). So, why do the first European historical sources not mention them when describing the diet of the ancient Canarians?
His answer is that perhaps, during the Conquest, lentils had ceased to be a main crop, as were durum wheat, barley, or broad beans, but families continued to harvest them for their own consumption, in a domestic setting.
And that detail turned out to be crucial for their survival, they point out: the aboriginal population was decimated by the clashes with the Castilian troops, the new diseases brought by the conquerors, and slavery; especially the male population.
But the reality is that a good number of Canarians today have aboriginal genes that they have received through maternal inheritance, due to the many marriages between European men and Canarian women celebrated after the Conquest. Surely, the work adds, it was those women who continued planting the same legumes as their grandmothers, not only because they grew better, but because they were "theirs."
"In ethnographic interviews, Canarian women (today) have demonstrated greater knowledge about the crops used for family food than men," the authors elaborate. It is not the only case, they add: there are studies on how women have been key in various places around the world to conserve local biodiversity.
The popular 'Lanzarote type' lentil
With the higher-yielding crops that were established in Tenerife and Gran Canaria from the 15th century onwards, such as sugar cane, lentils were relegated to other islands, which in time supplied them to the whole of the Canary Islands and mainland Spain. Even an apparently arid island, such as Lanzarote, was a major producer of lentils until the mid-20th century.
The study saves a final surprise for the end that has to do with that last detail: contrary to what the authors expected, the aboriginal lentils of the Canary Islands do not resemble modern lentils from North Africa as much as they do Spanish lentils.
Why? Didn't they arrive with the Berber population 2,000 years ago? The answer is that the 'modern' lentils of a large part of Spain are the ones that resemble the old Canary Island lentils.
The fact that there is hardly a supermarket on the peninsula that does not sell 'Lanzarote type' lentils - harvested today in other places, because their cultivation is already irrelevant on the island - speaks volumes about how appreciated and popular the lentils from the Canary Islands 'of a lifetime' were on the Iberian Peninsula for a long time.