THE GUAN^CHES: THE ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF 



CANARY.' 



By Capt. J. W. Gambier, It. N. 



Much has been written of late and much said of the merits of the 

 Canary Islands as health resorts, but as yet the attention of the gen- 

 eral public does not seem to have been drawn to the extremely inter- 

 estiug problems as to the remote past of the human race which a 

 study of the manners and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these 

 islands affords. Various spots on the face of the earth have been 

 claimed by scientific men as the cradle of the human race, and different 

 nations adopt different names for the three or four recognized types 

 which have been discovered in long barrows and round barrows, in 

 caves, and deep under the soil; but practically it comes to the same 

 thing, by whatever name they may be known, if we can only identify 

 these people with others bearing the same structural peculiarities, and 

 this, as regards the Guaucherace of the Canary Islands, we are enabled 

 to do. We trust, therefore, that the following remarks and sketches 

 may enable those who are unable to visit those extraordinarily inter- 

 esting places in person to form some idea of what our earliest ancestors, 

 or at least their contemporaries, were like. 



The habitations of tliese ancient people, who were of what we call 

 the Iberian race, were mostly caves excavated in the sandstone rock, 

 which crops out in some parts of these otherwise almost entirely vol- 

 canic islands. But the stone implements of ruder form, preserved in 

 the museum of Las Palmas, were no doubt the workmanship of people 

 long ago antecedent to those who scooped out tliese very symmetrical 

 caves. Who or what thej^^ were is lost in the dim uncertainty of the 

 past, and nothing but their bones and their skulls and their rude imple- 

 ments remains to us. In some few instances the caves were hollowed 

 out of the easily worked tufa, or volcanic deposit; but as to the great 

 majority of these caves in the tufa it may be said that they are merely 

 accidental holes utilized by the earliest aborigines, and are not nearly 

 so interesting as the sandstone dwellings. As to these sandstone caves, 

 it must have been a most laborious work for people to produce them 

 whose only tools were implements of stone. It may be accepted as a 

 generally well-ascertained fact that in some of these caves we are actu- 



Trom The Antiquary, Nos. 49, 50,51, new series. Vol. XXIX, January, February, 

 March, 1894, 



541 



