page_title: Canary Islands in pre-colonial times
section_title: Population genetics
hierarchical_section_title: Canary Islands in pre-colonial times / Population genetics
caption_attribution_description: Cima del monte Garajonay en la isla de la Gomera (islas canarias), se observa la reconstrución de un santuario Guanche (antiguos pobladores de canarias) y el volcán Teide al fondo, en la isla de Tenerife La foto fue tomada con cámara digital sin tripode. Cardenasg 15:29, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
context_page_description: The Canary Islands have been known since antiquity. Until the Spanish colonization between 1402 and 1496, the Canaries were populated by an indigenous population, whose origin is still the subject of discussion among historians and linguists.
  The islands were visited by the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Carthaginians. According to the 1st century CE Roman author and philosopher Pliny the Elder, the archipelago was found to be uninhabited when visited by the Carthaginians under Hanno the Navigator in 5th century BCE, but ruins of great buildings were seen. This story may suggest that the islands were inhabited by other peoples prior to the Guanches.
  At the time of medieval European engagement, the Canary Islands were inhabited by a variety of indigenous communities. The pre-colonial population of the Canaries is generically referred to as Guanches, although, strictly speaking, Guanches were originally the inhabitants of Tenerife. According to the chronicles, the inhabitants of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were referred to as Maxos, Gran Canaria was inhabited by the Canarii, El Hierro by the Bimbaches, La Palma by the Auaritas and La Gomera by the Gomeros.
context_section_description: A 2003 genetics research article by Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. published in the European Journal of Human Genetics compared  mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA, inherited matrilineally) from aboriginal Guanche (collected from Canarian archaeological sites) to mtDNA of today's Canarians and concluded that, "despite the continuous changes suffered by the population (Spanish colonisation, slave trade), aboriginal mtDNA lineages constitute a considerable proportion [42 – 73%] of the Canarian gene pool. Although the Berbers are the most probable ancestors of the Guanches, it is deduced that important human movements [e.g., the Islamic-Arabic conquest of the Berbers] have reshaped Northwest Africa after the migratory wave to the Canary Islands" and the "results support, from a maternal perspective, the supposition that since the end of the 16th century, at least, two-thirds of the Canarian population had an indigenous substrate, as was previously inferred from historical and anthropological data." mtDNA haplogroup U subclade U6b1 is Canarian-specific and is the most common mtDNA haplogroup found in aboriginal Guanche archaeological burial sites.
  Lineages of Y-DNA (inherited patrilineally) were analysed in a later study by Rosa Fregel and colleagues published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. Y-DNA was extracted from the same aboriginal Guanche samples used by Nicole Maca-Meyer et al., and compared to samples from 17th-18th century remains post-dating the Spanish conquest of the islands, and samples from the present population. They found Berber Y-chromosome lineages (E-M81, E-M78 and J-M267) prominent in the indigenous remains, confirming the North West African origin for the Guanches deduced Nicole Maca-Meyer et al. from 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." They conclude that the European colonization of the Canary Islands changed the local gene-pool most dramatically in the male line.
caption: A Guanche sanctuary in the Garajonay National Park - La Gomera Island
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