Canary Islands in pre-colonial times

According to Pliny the Elder, an expedition of Mauretanians sent by King Juba II (d. 23 CE) to the archipelago visited the islands, finding them uninhabited, but noting ruins of great buildings.

The Phoenicians may have arrived seeking the precious red orchil dye extracted from lichen – if the Canaries represent Pliny the Elder's Purple Isles or the Hesperides of legend.

European disembarkations of Genovese, Castilian and Portuguese missionaries and pirates on Canarian shores became relatively common and the prehispanic populations experienced a long and ongoing process of Westernisation before formal colonization took place.

Professor D. Juan Álvarez Delgado, on the other hand, argued that the Canaries remained uninhabited until 100 BCE, when Greek and Roman sailors began to explore the area.

In the second half of the 1st century BCE, King Juba II of Numidia abandoned North African prisoners on the islands, who eventually became the pre-Hispanic Canarians.

[3] Archaeology suggests that the original settlers arrived by sea, importing domestic animals such as goats, sheep, pigs and dogs and grains such as wheat, barley and lentils.

However, there is no archaeological or historical evidence to prove that either the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains or the Canarian pre-colonial population had knowledge or made use of navigation techniques.

[4] The peak of Tenerife is visible from the African coast on the very clearest of days, but the currents around the islands tend to lead the boats southwest and west, past the archipelago and into the Atlantic Ocean.

[8] Archeological research in Gran Canaria has found a relatively high prevalence of auricular exostosis among Pre-Hispanic craniums, reaching 34.35% in coastal burial places.

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.

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.

Gran Canaria, on the other hand, appears to have been divided into two guanartematos (i.e. functionally, politically and structurally differentiated regions): Telde and Gáldar, each governed by a Guanarteme.