Atlantis, this legendary state, is known to descendants, mainly thanks to the works of Plato. According to his dialogues "Critias" and "Timaeus", the legendary island measured 540 by 360 kilometers and was located west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The inhabitants of Atlantis - the people of the Atlanteans - were distinguished by a developed civilization.
According to legend, the ancestor of the Atlanteans was the god Poseidon himself, from whose sons the Atlanteans descended. The country was distinguished not only by high civilization, but also rich in flora and fauna, among which there were even elephants.
The end of the history of the great state was sad - literally in one day the earthquake and the flood that followed destroyed Atlantis completely. According to Plato, it happened almost ten thousand years ago.
It seemed that the Atlanteans had sunk into oblivion forever, and their name was preserved only in the name of the Atlantic Ocean, the Atlas mountain range on the northwestern coast of Africa and ancient Greek myths …
Nevertheless, the history of Atlantis after many centuries was continued. Some supporters of the real existence of the legendary island associated it with Macaronesia - not to be confused with Micronesia.
Macaronesia in Greek means "blessed islands" - this is how ancient Greek geographers called the islands west of the Strait of Gibraltar in the Atlantic Ocean near Europe and Africa.
Some researchers are more specific and point to the modern Canary Islands as the remnants of the dead Atlantis, and the indigenous population of the Canary Islands - the Guanche tribes - as descendants of the Atlanteans.
The Canary Islands were already known to the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Greeks. The latter called the Canary Islands the Happy Islands. Later, Arab sailors also visited it. In 1312, Italians set foot on the land of the Happy Islands.
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In 1341, with the money of the Portuguese crown, an expedition of Genoese and Spanish sailors was equipped here. The Spaniards and the Portuguese vied among themselves for dominance in the Canary Islands. The Spaniards won.
The history of the conquest of the archipelago stretched over a hundred years. This is surprising when you consider that the natives were armed with only stones and wooden clubs. And yet they somehow confronted the Spaniards and their firearms.
In 1402, the population of the Canary Islands was about 20 thousand people. In their last battle with the Spaniards, most of the Guanches, surrounded by superior enemy forces, threw themselves into the abyss, only fifteen hundred women, old people and children remained on the island.
In 1494, the Spanish queen Isabella, having bought the right to the Canary Islands from the ruined heirs of one of the conquerors of the Canary Islands, Jacques de Bettencourt, sent an army there, which finally took possession of the Canary Islands. Perhaps the Guanches would have fought further if the plague had not begun in their "army" brought to the islands by the invaders …
The Spaniards settled in the Canaries only at the end of the 15th century, when the population of the archipelago was reduced by half. And after 150 years, not a single purebred representative of the Guanches remained on the islands - most of them were exterminated, the survivors later mixed with the Spaniards.
In the 15th century, the short, swarthy Spaniards were struck by the appearance of the Guanches. Those were fair-skinned, tall (the average height exceeded 180 centimeters, but there were also two-meter handsome men among them), fair-haired (often red), light-eyed.
They dressed in animal skins. They were a very hospitable people who loved music and dancing, good-natured and honest. They lived in stone houses and worshiped the sun.
The current descendants of the ancient people are not at all like their ancestors - they are now undersized brunettes. And the word "guanch", oddly enough, is considered abusive on the islands.
Scientists became interested in this people only when it practically disappeared from the face of the Earth. Today there are many hypotheses about the origin of the Guanches, and many scientists - historians, ethnographers and anthropologists - come to the conclusion that these people are the descendants of the enlightened race of Atlanteans who managed to escape when Atlantis sank into the depths of the ocean …
For the first time this hypothesis was put forward in the 17th century by the German scientist-encyclopedist Athanasius Kircher. However, most likely, the roots of this hypothesis are in the legends of the aborigines of the Canary Islands, who considered themselves the only people in the world who escaped from a catastrophe that occurred in antiquity.
An argument in favor of the "Atlantic" origin of the Guanches is also considered the fact that the Guanches, being islanders, had absolutely no navigation skills.
But how did the people not familiar with navigation get to the islands? Today, scientists literally put their heads on this issue.
Some believe that the settlement was carried out along a chain of islands and islets that have now disappeared. Two routes are considered: one from the southern part of Europe, the other from the west coast of Africa.
As you know, Cro-Magnons lived in the Ice Age, when the level of the World Ocean was below the current level by about 150-200 meters, so all now shallow areas of the African shelf were dry land.
So the way to the Canary Islands was quite easy at that time. Therefore, some scholars associate the Guanches with related threads with the ancient Berber tribes of North Africa.
However, quite a few scientists are inclined to explain this strange dislike of the Guanches for the sea in a different way. Bearing in mind that between the Canary Islands, separated from each other by straits, there was no sea communication (and therefore life on each of the islands had its own characteristics), and the Guanches, the children of the ocean, are almost the only island people in the world who do not have no seaworthiness, scientists concluded that this was no accident.
Well, how is that? Residents of neighboring islands, located literally a few hundred meters from each other, did not even try to swim to their neighbors! Even primitive boats were not built, although there was enough timber on the islands for this!
How can this riddle be explained? Experts came to the conclusion that the lack of navigation skills among the Guanches is explained by the unusual beliefs of the islanders: it is possible that their distant ancestors survived a terrible catastrophe associated with the ocean, after which a strict taboo on the desire to conquer the sea was passed down from generation to generation.
All this together gave reason to believe that the ancestors of the Guanches were here in those distant times, when these islands formed a single piece of land with the African continent.
During a cataclysm, the ocean level rose sharply, and the Guanches were unwittingly cut off from the mainland.
The Guanches considered themselves children of the Sun. The culture of this people at the time of the arrival of the Europeans was at the Neolithic stage of development.
However, the customs of the islanders, oddly enough, showed an incomprehensible similarity with the customs of highly cultured ancient peoples.
The Guanches were ruled by ten elected kings - just like in Atlantis, as described by Plato. They had a caste of priests who wore robes and hats the same as the Babylonians.
Like the Egyptians, the Guanches knew how to embalm the bodies of the dead and buried them in unusual domed tombs, as the ancient Greeks did, and finally, the Guanches built step pyramids, like the Maya or Aztecs! (These pyramids have survived to this day and you can admire them.
In one mountain village, there is a museum of ancient cultures, initiated by the famous traveler and scientist Thor Heyerdahl.) As in some countries of Asia, as well as on the islands of Micronesia, polyandry existed in the Canaries.
Just like the aborigines of Australia and the Bushmen of South Africa, the Guanches produced fire by friction, in the Canary Islands, as in Ancient Babylon and Peru of the Inca era, priestesses - brides of the gods, “sacred virgins” were revered. And also - according to ancient local legends - the Guanches were able to … fly!
Separate inscriptions of the Guanches, inscribed on stones, have survived. Some researchers have compared these Canarian scripts with ancient Libyan, Phoenician and Numidian scripts. However, the materials found, due to their insignificant volume, did not allow scientists to decipher them …
In the Canary Islands, researchers found traces of rock writing. Who and when left these written signs here? In which language of the world were they written? All these questions are also included in the series of Canarian mysteries …
One of the secrets of the Guanches is their strange language. The fact is that the Guanches of the islands of Homera, Hierro, Tenerife could communicate with each other with the help of … a whistle that was heard at a distance of several kilometers!
And these were not some pre-arranged signals, but the most lively spoken language in which one could even gossip. Linguists today cannot find a single "relative" of the strange language of the Guanches …
But all the unusual hypotheses regarding the origin of the Guanches from the Atlanteans are only hypotheses. They can be refuted, but they can also be confirmed! How?
Maybe today, in the age of technological progress, with the help of modern scientific methods, it will be possible to confidently recognize the descendants of the assimilated Guanches among the Hispanic Canarians? As it turned out, you can!
Establishing the fact of kinship or descent from a common ancestor of both two separate people and entire populations is possible by comparing their DNA.
This is the only way to judge with complete confidence whether these people are related to each other, and if so, to what extent they are related.
Molecular biology methods make it possible to establish with absolute accuracy the relationship in the male and female lines of a particular person with other people.
The child receives genes from both the father and the mother. How to identify the direct descendants of the Guanches among the modern Canary people? It is known that the Y chromosome is passed exclusively from father to son, which makes it possible to determine the direct relationship in the male line.
In 2009, a group of geneticists led by Rosa Fregel analyzed the Y-haplogroups of male Guanches mummies and found that most of them are carriers of the Y-haplogroup E-M81.
Comparisons with the haplogroups of modern Canary people showed that among them about ten percent are carriers of this haplogroup!
It should be noted that this haplogroup is present not only in the Canaries, but also in the geographically close region of North-West Africa, namely, among the Kabils, a people of Berber origin living in the Maghreb (the name given by medieval Arab geographers and historians to countries located to the west from Egypt).
Kabila by origin are such famous football players as Zinedine Zidane and Karim Benzema, as well as the actors brothers Sami and Bibi Naseri.
If we assume that the great Plato was right, then the results of genetic research allow us to see in them not only the direct descendants of the ancient Guanches, but also Atlanteans from the legendary Atlantis, who, thanks to science, unexpectedly "returned" to us after many thousands of years …
In any case, this unusual hypothesis is already finding its followers. So, for example, the writer and researcher Nikolai Nepomniachtchi did not give a lecture in Moscow on the topic "Guanches - direct descendants of the Atlanteans?"
If orthodox historians listen to scientists geneticists, then it may very well be that it will be possible to paint over some blank spots in the history of human civilization.
O. Bulanova