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Concept
Guanches
Summary
The Guanches were the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean some west of the North African coast. They spoke the Guanche language, which went extinct in the 17th century and is believed to have been related to Berber languages.
It is believed that they may have arrived on the archipelago some time in the first millennium BC. The Guanches were the only native people known to have lived in the Macaronesian archipelago region before the arrival of Europeans, as there is no accepted evidence that the other Macaronesian archipelagos (the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores) were inhabited. After the Spanish conquest of the Canaries starting in the early 15th century, many natives were wiped out by the Spanish conquerors while the rest assimilated over time into the settler population and culture, although elements of their original culture survive within Canarian customs and traditions, such as Silbo (the whistled language of La Gomera Island), as well as some lexicon of Canarian Spanish. Some scholars have classified the destruction of the Guanche people and culture as an early example of colonial genocide.
In 2017, the first genome-wide data from the Guanches confirmed a North African origin and that they were genetically most similar to ancient North African Berber peoples of the nearby North African mainland.
The native term guanachinet literally translated means "person of Tenerife" (from Guan = person and Achinet = Tenerife). It was modified, according to Juan Núñez de la Peña, by the Castilians into "Guanches". Though etymologically being an ancient, Tenerife-specific, term, the word Guanche is now mostly used to refer to the pre-Hispanic Indigenous inhabitants of the entire archipelago.
Genetic evidence shows that northern African people made a significant contribution to the aboriginal population of the Canaries following desertification of the Sahara at some point after 6000 BC. Linguistic evidence suggests ties between the Guanche language and the Berber languages of North Africa, particularly when comparing numeral systems.
Official source
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