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Trilobites

DNA Clues to an Ancient Canary Islands Voyage

The islands’ pioneers likely arrived centuries before European conquest, as part of a large-scale movement of people from North Africa.

Samples being collected from mummified remains at El Museo Canario in the Canary Islands.Credit...Desenfoque Producciones

Today the Canary Islands are a tourist hub, a volcanic archipelago with palm trees and azure beaches, located off the coast of Morocco and governed by Spain. But the history of this paradise is marred by the brutal conquest, enslavement and treatment of its indigenous people by European colonizers beginning around the 15th century.

Although scientists know a fair bit about the fate of the islands’ original inhabitants, much is unknown about their origins. Some scholars have debated whether the indigenous people sailed to the islands themselves more than a thousand years ago or were stranded there by ancient Mediterranean mariners.

Increasingly, the evidence points to an intentional journey. Ancient DNA from skeletal remains found across the islands now suggests that the islands’ earliest pioneers were North Africans who may have arrived around 100 C.E. or earlier, and settled on every island by at least 1000 C.E. The finding supports previous archaeological, anthropological and genetic studies indicating that the island’s first inhabitants were Berbers from North Africa, a group that today lives in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and parts of the Sahara.

“This is the first ancient DNA study that includes archaeological remains from all the seven Canary Islands,” said Rosa Fregel, a population geneticist at the Universidad de La Laguna in Spain. Her team’s results, which were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, also undercut the idea that the islands’ early indigenous inhabitants were not explorers in their own right.

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The debate over how, when and why the Canary Islands were first populated arose in part from records made by Europeans in the 1400s, which claimed the native Canarians had no navigational skills. The texts have led scholars to wonder how the indigenous people, who consist of several different tribes such as the Guanches and Bimbapes, reached the islands. Were they brought by Romans or Carthaginians, or did they have the means and ability to sail there themselves?

“The case of the Canary Islands is of particular interest because the indigenous culture and language was lost after the European colonization, complicating our ability to know more about the past,” said Laura Botigué, an expert in North African genetics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the study.

To investigate the early peopling of the Canary Islands before Europeans arrived and introduced the slave trade, Dr. Fregel and her colleagues collected nearly 50 mitochondrial genomes from remains at 25 sites. Mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from one’s mother who inherited it from their mother and so on, offer population geneticists clues to help decipher ancient human migrations. Most of the sites were radiocarbon dated between approximately 150 and 1400 C.E., although a couple of them came after post-conquest periods.

“In the Canary Islands indigenous people, we find typical North African lineages, but also some other lineages with a Mediterranean distribution, and also some lineages that are of sub-Saharan African origin,” Dr. Fregel said. That fits with the archaeological and genetic history of North Africa, she said: Previous studies have shown that by the time the Canary Islands were inhabited, Berbers from North Africa had already mixed with Mediterranean and sub-Saharan African groups.

In their analysis, the team found that some of the islands did not have much genetic diversity, whereas others had a great deal, indicating that these ancient populations may have been large. The researchers found lineages that were known only from the central part of North Africa, as well as more common lineages from other parts of North Africa, Europe and the Near East. The team also found four new lineages exclusive to Gran Canaria and two eastern islands.

“This is interesting,” said Dr. Fregel. “It could mean that the colonization happened in at least two phases, with the second migration wave affecting only the islands closer to the African continent.”

Dr. Fregel said that although her findings don’t show how ancient people reached the Canaries, they do provide further evidence that the movement was a large one, made by people who had the resources to survive on the islands.

Nicholas St. Fleur is a science reporter who writes about archaeology, paleontology, space and other topics. He joined The Times in 2015. Before that, he was an assistant editor at The Atlantic. More about Nicholas St. Fleur

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Ancient Mariners: From DNA on the Canary Islands, Genes That Got Around. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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