Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and La Laguna (ULPGC and ULL) are preparing to analyze for the first time the DNA of the remains of 600 pre-Hispanic aborigines from the Canary Islands kept by the Museum of Man from Paris, in a project that investigates the first colonization of the islands.
As reported by the ULPGC, these are skeletal remains of individuals from all over the archipelago, except Lanzarote; mostly skulls recovered in archaeological sites on the islands between the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century by Canarian and French anthropologists, such as Gregorio Chil y Naranjo, Diego Ripoche, René Vernau, and Sabin Berthelot.
This line of research on pre-Hispanic remains deposited in the Parisian museum began in 2021, but thanks to the agreement recently signed with the Government of the Canary Islands, more complex studies of these vestiges will now be possible, analyzing DNA and using techniques such as Carbon 14 and stable isotopes, which to date had not been possible to apply.
The co-director of the project, Jonathan Santana, explains that the ULPGC will be immersed in the anthropological study of the remains to find out the age and sex of these individuals, their diseases and evidence of interpersonal violence, their dietary patterns (through stable isotopes) and its age (with carbon 14 tests).
The other director of the project, the genetics expert Rosa Fregel, from the ULL, details that her team will be in charge of the study of ancient DNA to explore the genetic differences between the human populations of the different islands, as well as dental calculations to provide more information. information on the diet of the aborigines.
For the investigation of the life of the pre-Hispanic populations in the Canary Islands, access to these remains represents a unique opportunity to learn aspects of the ways of life of these populations, the antiquity of the settlement of the Canary Islands and the processes of adaptation and resilience to oceanic island environments, highlights public universities.
In fact, this sample allows us to significantly increase the number of individuals on some islands such as El Hierro, Fuerteventura, and La Palma, which are currently underrepresented in the Canary Islands anthropological record.
Some of these remains, in a very good state of conservation, have not been analyzed in more than a century, which is why the ULPGC and the ULL believe that they are “facing a milestone in the archaeological studies of the islands.”
“It will allow more complex theories to be developed about how the Canarian aborigines lived on these islands, what challenges they faced, and how they developed social strategies to survive isolated for so long,” they add. EFE