The appearance of which we owe to the Canary Islands. Origin of the Canary Islands and their volcanoes

Secret canary islands(middle Ages)

The river of time! For almost a thousand years, busy with its internal affairs, medieval Europe forgot about an old dream - to find the "promised land" in the Western Ocean, fabulous islands Blessed, a distant abode of "righteous souls", about which ancient authors wrote so much, In the fever of the Crusades, having transferred this land from West to East, it is very late, tired and disappointed, giving almost the entire Iberian Peninsula to the Berbers and Arabs and losing the battle for " the Holy Sepulcher, ”turned her eyes towards the Atlantic. Meanwhile, primitive purtulans, descriptions of the coasts - the heirs of the ancient periples - and maps of medieval sailors were full of the most fantastic names of the islands of the Sea of ​​​​Darkness, whose name they borrowed for a while from the Arab Sinbads. True, the Sinbads did not differ in particular courage in Atlantic enterprises, knowing perfectly only the seas of the Indian Ocean - up to Indonesia and China. The Atlantic remained a strange, distant world for the Arabs, "mare incognitum", as they would say in the Middle Ages. And there were, perhaps, justifying reasons for this. For example, the Arabs knew the ancient authors better than the medieval Europeans and carried the "burden" of the ancient tradition in their ideas about the distant "Western Sea". The ancient tradition, as you know, placed everything distant, alien and monstrous in the “land of darkness”, in the west, where the sun was setting and the “realm of the dead” was located. “There the vault of heaven rests on the waters and Gloom and Horror are born. There is no return to those who dare to swim in these waters, just as there is no return to the dead from the realm of shadows, ”the ancient Greeks said. According to their ideas, the West was a natural "end of the world", where only desperate heroes could go - Hercules, Jason, Odysseus. And what labors the accomplished feats cost them!

How many fables and terrifying stories - about the “frozen” western sea, in which it is impossible for a ship to sail because of the petrified mud covering it or huge floating fields of algae and islands that suck in ships - the galleys of imagination were taken from ancient times straight into the Middle Ages. Launched from stocks by the still enterprising Phoenicians and Carthaginians in order to scare away "beginner salag sailors" from the sea routes, they carried a charge of impressive information through the "dark centuries" of the early Middle Ages. , were terribly afraid of the mysterious waters of the Atlantic with its "magnetic islands" and the Bronze Horseman, and conveyed their fear to the Italians and Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Normans.

The first Europeans to set foot on the land of the Happy Islands - and this is reliably known! - were Italians, sons of the free Republic of Genoa. “There (to the Happy Islands), according to the legend of the fathers,” the famous Petrarch allegedly wrote, “the armed fleet of the Genoese landed.” It happened in 1312. Then, when the islands were again learned in Europe, in 1341 a new sea expedition was equipped with the money of the Portuguese crown, consisting of Genoese and Spanish sailors who already knew the way to the “purple west”.

Of course, the Genoese and Spaniards, who once again discovered the Canary Islands, did not find on them a trace of little cheerful black "imps" - the memory of them at that time was kept by the still undiscovered frescoes of Tassili. On the contrary, a tall, blond and blue-eyed people lived in the Canary Islands - the mysterious Guanches, who managed to disappear in the fire of conquest before scientists figured out the secret of their origin. Unfortunately, as happened more than once in history, they shared the sad fate of those who were destroyed by the European conquistadors who were not afraid of either God or the devil - she and the Yagans of Tierra del Fuego, the inhabitants of Tasmania and many other peoples not named here ...

What else became known in Europe about the Guanches, except that they were "savages" dressed in the skins of goats and dogs, which they ate, and that they had agriculture?

... The islanders at the time of the arrival of the French (Norman) and Spanish conquerors, equipped with firearms, lived in the truest sense of the word in the Stone Age. They made axes and spearheads from "volcanic glass", obsidian, which was mined on the slopes of the mountains. They did not know metal tools at all, and this made a great impression on the Europeans - white people living in the Stone Age ... In addition, the Guanches were excellent slingers, and the sling replaced their bow with arrows. Under the influence of the newcomers, the Guanches began to make shields from the wood of the “dragon tree”. Apparently, the Guanches did not know the potter's wheel, as they made dishes by hand molding. They made awls and needles from goat bones. They also had wooden bowls and spoons, known in Europe since the Paleolithic. Animal bones were used to make spearheads, harpoons and fishhooks. Since the islanders did not have boats (although they crossed small straits between the islands by swimming or on logs), they fished from the shore on a hook. Sometimes they arranged driven fishing, directing it by swimming into the nets placed in the bays. At night, they beamed fish, blinding them with torches soaked in seal oil, and stringing them on harpoons. In small isolated bays, fish were poisoned with white poisonous juice of a cactus-euphorbia.

One of the mysterious features of the Guanches was, with the overall appearance of the Neolithic culture, the ability to mummify the corpses of the dead, which, as you know, is characteristic only of highly developed peoples, such as the ancient Egyptians or the Incas. South America. The Guanches did this with the help of the juice of the famous “dragon tree”, which was once hunted by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Libyans, and in the Middle Ages by the Spaniards and Italians. The Guanches themselves deified the "dragon tree", and if it died of old age, this, in their opinion, foreshadowed misfortune. Golden hair, Lawrence Green writes, for which Venetian beauties were famous in the Middle Ages, owes its origin to a special dye, the main ingredient of which was “dragon's blood” - the famous blood-red juice of the famous tree. In addition, European healers highly valued this composition for its antiseptic properties and took a lot of money for medicines prepared on its basis (for example, tree sap was mixed with grape alcohol and the resulting mixture was used in the treatment of stomach or skin ulcers).

Here we will give the floor to the person who himself visited the Canaries and collected a lot of information about the Guanches, their way of life, customs and beliefs. Lawrence Green, already familiar to us, says: “Scientists believe that the Guanches colonized these islands a long time ago. They were tall blondes with white skin, and their women were distinguished by a very beautiful figure; their hair, like that of men, was blond, red or chestnut, and they retained this hair color for centuries. Getting here for the first time, travelers expected to meet an African type, but found a Caucasoid one. And not only the color of the skin, but also the character of the Guanches resembled Europeans. All the islands were inhabited. Despite some differences between the inhabitants of individual islands, they were all similar to each other and spoke dialects of the same language. It would be most correct to assume that the Guanches came to the islands from the sea. But how? They didn't have boats. And in fact, they did not understand navigation so much that they were horrified at the mere thought of sailing or rowing from one island to another ... "

The Guanches were good swimmers, as reported by the Spaniards in the 15th century, so good that they easily covered the nine miles that separated Lanzarote from the small desert island of Graciosa. Still, this does not explain the problem in any way, because the closest islands to the African mainland, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, are still sixty miles away. How did the Guanches get to the Canary Islands: along the once-existing land bridge, as some researchers suggest (but this bridge, according to geologists, disappeared even at a time when there was no man on the planet). Or maybe there are other reasons behind the neglect of seafaring skills?

As one of the historians of geography, K. Sapper, believed, “the most ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands undoubtedly sailed on ships from the African mainland. But since the coast was not conducive to navigation, and the territory of the islands satisfied all the needs of the inhabitants, they, not experiencing an extreme need for external relations, forgot the art of navigation. However, it can be assumed, agreeing with the opinion of this researcher, that the disappearance of nautical art among the Guanches, among whom Phoenician-Carthaginian settlers were added, was influenced by the events of the era of “civil unrest” in Carthage, when it was decided to liquidate the distant overseas colony and destroy its inhabitants - colonists. Then, in the very act of banning navigation among the inhabitants of the Canary Islands and in its actual thousand-year oblivion, there are quite understandable reasons - the rejection of ties with the homeland that betrayed the colonists and the desire to protect themselves from possible invasions from the sea. However, in the XIV-XV centuries, this did not help the Guanches to “hide low” and even avoid a brutal massacre, when most of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands were exterminated and until they completely disappeared from the face of the earth. The last Guanches still remained on the islands in the 17th century, however, they no longer used their native language, having completely switched to Spanish ...

But let us again give the floor to Lawrence Greene. He writes that everyone agreed that the Guanches “were a wonderful people, although with somewhat strange customs. The Guanches stood out: to know, warriors and peasants. They told the conquerors that God created people from earth and water, men and women equally, and gave them flocks of sheep to sustain life. After that, several more men were made, but they did not receive sheep. God told them:

Serve both and they will feed you.

Noble people could not marry people of low birth, and if there was no one whom a noble could marry without defiling the purity of his family, brothers married sisters. Some chronicles say that the representatives of the nobility were white-skinned, and the peasants were dark-skinned.

By chance, these "dark-skinned" people were not a remnant of the population of the Canary Islands, more ancient than the Guanches, whose traces vaguely appear during archaeological excavations (the French researcher R. Verno wrote about the local "pygmies", as we have already said)? Indeed, if you read the memories of eyewitnesses, you can see that not all Guanches were "white gods." It is possible that some local undersized and dark-skinned population, akin to the “cave Ethiopians” of West and North Africa, remained on the islands, and perhaps representatives of other anthropological types and cultures, starting from the Cretans, accidentally or deliberately remained and mixed with the Guanches. Mycenaean sailors and ending with the Berbers and Arabs. And about the foundation of settlements and purple-dyed Carthaginians and Libyans on the islands, we find direct indications in the sources ...

The Spaniards and French of Betancourt, who took part in the conquest of the islands, which lasted almost a hundred years, considered the Guanches downright giants, and they really were a head, or even two, taller than the undersized inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. It must be assumed that the conquerors got hard from the Guanches, even armed with only stone and wooden weapons. Gran Canaria, or the Grand Canary Island, writes Green, is actually half the size of the big island Tenerife, but it received the name "Great" because here the Guanches resisted the Spanish intervention more fiercely than the inhabitants of other islands. The chronicles of the conquerors told about the islanders that they ran faster than horses and were able to jump over quite deep gorges. Even the women of the Guanches were brave and strong warriors and threw many soldiers into the abyss from the rocks ...

Vivid and memorable descriptions of the fierce struggle of the islanders for their freedom still shock the reader of the chronicles of the first conquistadors of the Atlantic. The Guanches always fought to the last warrior, and if they did surrender, it was only to save the lives of women and children. Judge for yourself how fierce their struggle was, if during the eighty years of this war of extermination on the "Great" island, the Guanche army decreased from 14 thousand to 600 people. In their last battle, most of the warriors threw themselves into the abyss, surrounded by superior enemy forces, leaving the enemy with only one and a half thousand women, old people and children. And in the mountains of Tenerife, the guerrilla war of the Guanches lasted until the end of 1495, and they would have fought longer if their army had not suffered an epidemic of plague brought by the Spaniards to the islands. Indeed, if a series of books “The Life of Remarkable Peoples” were published, the Guanches would rightfully belong to one of the first places, as one of the most freedom-loving and courageous peoples of the world, who adequately met the onslaught of European colonialists and died in an unequal struggle for freedom ...

“Since then, the Guanches,” writes L. Green, “virtually ceased to exist: some were killed in battle, others were driven into slavery. The conquerors took possession of their women and robbed them. Thus disappeared from the face of the earth, having carried away the mystery of its origin, the Neolithic race, which for almost a hundred years was able to provide worthy resistance to the invaders armed with firearms.

What do scientists think of the Guanche ancestry? Here are some of the theories of their origin, and it should be noted that there are a lot of these theories - even absolutely fantastic ones, which have nothing to do with genuine science. known to be pure anthropological type Guanches disappeared in the 16th century, but its features are still manifested on the islands among the descendants of mixed marriages. Lawrence Green writes: “... on the streets of Tenerife, my friends showed real blondes flickering among burning brunettes. And in general, in various parts of the island, people who knew that I was interested in Guanches often suddenly stopped my attention:

Look, a real guanche!

And he was always a man with blond hair and blue eyes, completely different from the Canarians of Spanish origin.

As you know, in determining the anthropological or racial type, skull measurements play an important role. Professor Verno, already mentioned by us, once studied great amount Guanche skulls found in their mountain burials. His conclusion shocked scientists: the Guanches should be attributed to the most ancient race of Europe, because they can be considered, on the basis of anthropometric data, the direct remains of the Cro-Magnon man who replaced the Neanderthals. Measurements of the skulls of Cro-Magnons and Guanches reveal so many similarities that one can speak of their direct relationship (in addition, the flint and wooden tools of the islanders, both found in the caves where they once lived, and those that remained from the 15th century, are almost identical Cro-Magnon). It turns out, in his opinion, that the Guanches are an ancient relic of distant historical eras, because the Cro-Magnons, the people of the Stone Age, appeared in Europe in the Ice Age, replacing the regressing Neanderthals, the last groups of which eventually died out or were destroyed by the Cro-Magnons - these first "accelerates in history, our ancestors.

According to Verno, during the advent of the Neolithic and the new Neolithic tribes with a new stone industry and a semi-agricultural type of culture, when the movement of population began in Europe, the Cro-Magnons were pushed south; for some time they lived in Spain, then moved to North Africa, and then migrated to the Canary Islands, where, as a relic, they remained in island isolation. True, there are many “buts” in his too “bold” hypothesis.

Indeed, the disappearance of the Cro-Magnon man, a pure “homo sapiens” who replaced the “still non-human” Neanderthal, is a mystery in itself, which is explained by the fact that this type did not survive, not because the Cro-Magnons were destroyed by someone or died out, but because that over time, as a result of migrations and displacements, he evolved into the modern type of man. That is, we are the descendants of that same Cro-Magnon, and some of us in different countries of the world, to a greater or lesser extent, is preserved by its individual "primordial features" (in the structure of the skull, skeleton, etc.).

For example, quite recently, a sensational article was published in a French anthropological journal stating that the most ancient Cro-Magnon type of man, the largest complex of his features, was preserved in Europe by the descendants of the ancient Iberians - modern Basques, considered a remnant of the Franco-Cantabrian branch of the population of the Upper Paleolithic. ( As researchers have known for a long time, the Basques differ from Europeans not only in their language, which does not find analogies with any of the European languages, but also in their anthropological type, which is different from the type of the average European. The same applies, as recently shown by studies by French anthropologists J. Bernard and J. Ruffy (Academy of Medicine), to their blood. Both scientists prove this on the basis of the “Blood Map” of the peoples compiled by them as a result of many years of work. Western Europe, which especially stands out areas inhabited by the Basques (Spain and France). Unlike other parts of Europe, for example, the zero blood group and the negative Rh factor prevail here, while the B blood group is practically not found at all. According to French anthropologists, this, without a doubt, means that the Basques form a closed national group with little (or no!) relation to the European population groups living around. In addition, the anthropological type of the Basques, compared by known features with the Cro-Magnons (their skulls and skeletons are known to scientists), makes Bernard and Ruffy classify the Basques as a type of "very similar to the Cro-Magnon man."). This population, in addition to the Basques of the Iberian Peninsula, partly includes the North African Berbers, descendants of the ancient Libyans (the languages ​​of the Basques and Berbers apparently have common roots and origins).

By the way, the highlanders of Bearn, where the European equivalent of Homer's silbo was discovered, have always aroused great interest among ethnographers, for example, with their funeral rites (as you know, the most conservative and long-lasting among other ethnographic phenomena among different peoples of the world), their musical instruments, songs and dances, nowhere else in Europe finding analogies, except perhaps among the Basques of Spain. Back in the Middle Ages, in Bearn, as well as in neighboring Navarre and French Gascony, tribes related to the Basques lived, a living relic of the “antediluvian” and once vast Iberian world. Until now, the Bearn dialect is close to Gascon, a branch of the old “Oc language”, which was spoken by the famous Gascon, the hero of Alexandre Dumas, the musketeer d'Artagnan, and a little earlier, Henry IV - the same king of Navarre and France, to whom "Paris cost mass" and Bartholomew night...

In theory, Verno is confused by the fact that he attributed to the Cro-Magnons, in his opinion, the direct ancestors of the Guanches, high seafaring skills, which allowed them to move to the Canary Islands. But in the "Cro-Magnon time", when there was no cattle breeding and agriculture yet, boats were made of the most primitive design, being adapted only for swimming in small rivers and reservoirs. It was impossible to leave the mainland on dugout canoes and rafts and sail to the Canary Islands together with the cattle that did not yet exist. As we saw from the previous material, the development of the wide ocean expanses was only within the reach of a developed maritime civilization - such maritime powers as the Cretans, the "peoples of the sea", the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks. And it is no coincidence that the Europeans, the descendants of the Cro-Magnons, discovered the Canary Islands only in the 14th century. This is the main objection to Verno's concept of the relationship between the Cro-Magnons and the Guanches, or rather, their direct relationship with each other ...

Indeed, later research did not support Vernot's hypothesis, although some of the subsequent theories of the origin of the Guanches were also not very plausible. For example, some researchers consider the Guanches to be immigrants from Europe, brought to the islands only in the 3rd century BC. BC e. a powerful stream of northerners, which then reached the coast of Africa. Others see in them the descendants of the Goths, Vandals or other northern Germanic tribes who were abandoned in the Canary Islands at a certain time of the great migration of peoples at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Still others suggest that the ancient settlers could be Assyrians or Jews, and the author of one "original" theory generally believes that the ancient Egyptians came to Africa directly from ... the Canary Islands (as if this explains the ancient Egyptian custom of mummification, so similar to the embalming of corpses among the Guanches) . But the authors of these hypotheses forget that all the above-mentioned peoples were much higher in terms of their development than the Guanches and it is not clear why then on the islands they “degraded” and forgot the art of navigation ... In addition, stone tools and other finds found in the Canarian caves show that the islands were inhabited many thousands of years ago, and these tools show a certain resemblance to the tools of the Guanches ...

Strange, but few researchers paid attention to the message of ancient Egyptian texts that in 2470-2270. BC e. (Indo-Europeans appeared in Europe at this time of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC) tribes of blue-eyed and fair-haired, almost red-haired, Libyan Temehu suddenly came to North Africa from somewhere. Further, the Egyptians portrayed the Cretans and other representatives of the famous "peoples of the sea" - excellent sailors and desperate sea pirates, starting somewhere from 1230-1200. BC e, - with blue eyes, in horned Viking helmets" on their heads (such helmets are known from finds in Spain, Corsica and Sardinia; male deities in "horned helmets" were found in Phoenicia, Crete and Cyprus). What, as Henri Lot wrote, says about their "northern origin" ... ( When using such evidence, anthropologists believe, one should always keep in mind that all ancient authors without exception were bad anthropologists and the only standard for assessing the external appearance of the peoples they wrote about was the physical type of their own people. And the Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the Romans are darkly pigmented groups, so they could exaggerate even a slight tendency to depigmentation (lightening) and specifically emphasize, which deprives their "anthropological messages" of the necessary persuasiveness. All this should be taken into account when we are talking or will be talking about the fair-haired and blue-eyed population of certain regions of the Mediterranean, information about which we find in ancient sources, starting with Egyptian texts ...).

In addition, the Phoenicians themselves and their Carthaginian descendants were peoples of mixed origin, formed (the first), according to the German researcher G. Germ, author of the book "Phoenicia - the Purple State", as a result of invasions of nomadic Indo-European tribes, starting with the Hyksos and the Philistines, to the Middle East and mixing them with local Semitic-Hamitic tribes. Moreover, other authors write (D. Baramki, S. Moskati), it was the legendary “peoples of the sea” of the Egyptian chronicles that “created Phoenicia proper from the coastal strip of Lebanon” (according to the formula of S. Moskati, “the Canaanites plus the peoples of the sea are equal to the Phoenicians”) . It is not surprising that among the Phoenicians and their Carthaginian descendants, who also mixed with the blue-eyed and fair-haired Libyans, there was a high percentage of "blonds". Therefore, it is quite possible that the tall and blond Guanches were descendants of any of the above peoples, including the Carthaginians and Libyans, who once settled in the Canary Islands.

We should not forget about another possibility (of a purely anthropological nature) to explain the "fair-haired" and "blue-eyed" Guanches. Anthropologists have noticed a strange feature - in groups isolated for a long time (or populations, as they call them), there is often an automatic increase in the number of individuals with blond hair and eyes, that is, according to them, the so-called "isogametation", or "splitting out of recessive forms ” - resulting in blond hair and blue eyes. Anthropologists cite as examples isolated groups of a once darkly pigmented population that became “blue-eyed blondes” as a result of isolation (for example, the Nuristanis of Iran, some of the peoples of the Caucasus, the Forest Nenets of Western Siberia, etc.).

It seems that the famous Soviet biologist N. I. Vavilov was the first to pay attention to this phenomenon during his travels in search of the "ancestral homes" of many cultivated plants of the Old World. So, among the infidels of Kafirnistan (Afghanistan), he noted this strange phenomenon depigmentation - "lightening", which, according to all other indicators, it seems, should not have happened. Vavilov associated this with the closed and long-isolated way of life of the highlanders of Afghanistan, with the effect of closely related marriages (that is, with "limiting the circle of marital ties" in conditions of long isolation from the neighboring population). Today, a similar phenomenon of depigmentation has been discovered by researchers in other closed, isolated groups of our planet: in the mountainous Kashmir - among the Vershik Burishks (Hunza, Gilgit), the Riff-Berbers of the Atlas Mountains (Morocco), the mountain Tajiks of the Pamirs, the Crimean Tatars, etc.

It seems that the Guanches, just belonging to one of such isolated groups for a long time (the inhabitants of some of the Canary Islands generally considered themselves the only people on earth, knowing nothing about the rest of the world), could become “unwittingly blond” as a result of the processes “ isogametation". Therefore, there is no need to make them "original" "blue-eyed Cro-Magnons", since no one has yet proved that Cro-Magnons were "blonde" - after all, hair color cannot be determined from the skulls ...

On the contrary, anthropological materials on those peoples who most of all preserved the “pristine features” of our distant Paleolithic ancestors (Basques, representatives of the Balkan-Caucasian local racial community - Montenegrins, Albanians of high mountain regions, some peoples of the Caucasus), indicate the opposite: the Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon population of Europe - in particular, the Mediterraneans, this oldest formation of the Caucasoid race in general - was darkly pigmented. And the depigmentation or “brightening” of the population first occurred in the north of Europe, and this happened, according to anthropologists, already in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), or even in the Neolithic. Therefore, the Guanches could, while still remaining carriers of the ancient Cro-Magnoid type (according to skulls), eventually turn from dark-pigmented into light-pigmented "blonds with blue eyes." They, from ancient times, who knows how to get to the Canary Islands, lived almost completely apart from the rest of the world, becoming an "isolated population" of the Canary Islands.

When L. Green, who was keenly interested in any information about the mysterious Guanches, or Guanches, as he writes, turned in Las Palmas to one of the authoritative specialists in the history of the islands, Perez Naranyo, he answered him: “In the sixteenth century, one quick-witted Italian sketched the Guanches . These drawings can be seen in the museum. There seems to be some similarity between the Cro-Magnons and the Guanches, but it is impossible to prove this. I hope that someday, as a result of new discoveries, we will learn more about the Guanche language and then we will understand a lot. At the present time, if we make a list of the unsolved mysteries of the world, then the riddle of the Guanches, apparently, will be in the first place in it ... "( As for the language of the Guanches, recently linguists have established that their language is not related to the Berber dialects, to any of the Berber dialects, of which there are more than three hundred. And in general, among today's known languages ​​of the world, linguists have not been able to find "relatives" of the Guanche language. Perhaps a certain lack of materials on this disappeared language is affecting, or perhaps its ancient “relatives” have long since disappeared from the face of the planet, leaving no “offspring” ...).

What other materials speak in favor of the North African origin of the Guanches? First of all, the mysterious and ancient art of mummification of corpses, which, by the time the conquerors arrived on the islands, was preserved by the Guanches (besides them, at that time only the peoples of the New World, especially the Incas and Chibcha-Muisca, owned this art). Lawrence Green in his book devotes a lot of space to mummies among the Guanches, in particular, he writes: “The mummies of the Guanches, apparently, also testify to some of their connections with Ancient Egypt. Three peoples on earth mummified their dead: the Egyptians, the Incas from Peru and the Guanches. It is inconceivable that the Incas or any other of the peoples of South America could, in primitive ships, overcome the trade wind, cross the Atlantic and colonize the Canary Islands. So the Egyptians did it.

The embalming technique of the Egyptians and the Guanches has much in common... The burial of mummies in pyramidal burial grounds also speaks of the similarity.” But, as you know, the Egyptians were not blue-eyed and fair-haired and always noted these features in their drawings among neighboring peoples (for example, among the Libyans). And anyone who has been to the museum of Las Palmas, which is more like a mortuary - "legions of tourists come here to stare at the fair-haired Guanches, and go out dumbfounded and shocked" - cannot help but note the yellow, golden, red, dark brown hair of mummies, but never black like the Spaniards. All this fully corresponds to what the first French and Spanish chroniclers, who witnessed the conquest of the islands, said about the islanders. In their opinion, the blond Guanches looked more like blond Swedes than like the inhabitants of such southern latitudes, who lived surrounded by dark-pigmented peoples and next to dark-skinned Africans. It turns out that the Egyptians could not be the ancestors of the Guanches and could not bring their art of mummification of the dead to the islands, unless we assume that, having got to the islands, they somehow “brightened” and “wild” ...

Another thing, if the Guanches are recognized as having a North African origin, then this would explain the art of embalming. According to Pliny the Elder, somewhere else in his time, in the forests beyond the Atlas, lived a tribe of Berber origin known as the "Canaria" - another faint hint, which, as the researchers write, may serve as a clue to unraveling the mystery. Further, in the “pocket dictionary” of the Guanche language, compiled by French monks, the name of one of the Canary Islands in the Guanche language, the island of Marzagan, was preserved. But Marzagan is also found near Agadir in North Africa and is a name of Berber origin. However, like the name of the Rif coast, reminiscent of Tenerife ...

All this gives reason to unite the Guanches with the ancient Libyan population of the north of the African continent and the south of the Pyrenees, but not with the "burning brunettes", as Green writes, who now inhabit the north of Africa, but with those "blonds" who once lived in Southern Europe and North Africa, and whom the Egyptians in bygone times called "red-haired Libyans." The latter have always been strongly influenced ancient egypt and even conquered it - from there, apparently, they borrowed their "Libyan" art of mummification and embalming of the dead, the ability to build pyramidal graves like Egyptian pyramids and even the gods of the Nile Valley. Moreover, archaeological excavations at Mersa Matruh speak of an even more ancient similarity between the cultures of pre-dynastic Egypt and the Libyan tribes. Even the settlement of the Nile Valley, according to Henri Lot, who studied the Tassili frescoes and the culture of their creators, came from the regions of the central Sahara, which was once a flowering garden and homeland, perhaps, of both the Ibero-Libyans and the Egyptians...

Pliny the Elder wrote about some Berber tribe of "Canaries" who lived in the forests beyond the Atlas Mountains, that is, on the coast of North-West Africa opposite from the Canary Islands. Lawrence Green in his book cites a curious passage in which he tries to explain the name of Homer's island (it has nothing to do with the famous Homer, the author of the immortal Iliad and Odyssey). He writes: "Homer - strange name, and no one knows exactly where it came from. It is known, however, that in the mountains of the Sahara, where the ancestors of the Guanches may have come from, the Gumero tribe lived. One scholar claimed that the people there knew the language of whistling. Maybe this is so, although it seems to me that the wonderful art of whistling words originated in the gorges of Gomera ... "

Another theory related to the Canary Islands and the "mystery of the Guanches" we owe to ancient times. Of course, we are talking about the “secret of all secrets”, the famous “problem of Atlantis” by Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher (teacher of the great Aristotle), who lived in 427-347 years. BC e. From these distant centuries, the genealogy of one of the most interesting, "semi-fantastic" branches of historical science, the so-called "atlantology", and the emergence of two categories of researchers - "atlantomans" (people who blindly believe in the existence of Atlantis) and "atlantophobes" (those who completely denies the existence of "fictitious" and "mythical" Plato's Atlantis - the fruit of his philosophical and sociological theorizing in search of a "model of an ideal state", which, in his opinion, was Atlantis). It is curious that these two currents originated at the same time, in ancient times: apparently, Plato himself belonged to the first, referring to his famous ancestor, “the wisest of the family of the wise”, the Athenian Solon (640–559 BC) ; to the second - a student of Plato, the famous Aristotle, who apparently knew something about the philosophical "kitchen" of his teacher, since he was the first to deny the existence of Plato's "fictitious Atlantis".

This digression was necessary for us in order to understand, as Lawrence Green writes, the “romantic hypothesis”, according to which the peaks of the Canary Islands are all that remains of the continent of Atlantis, and the Guanches allegedly were once ... shepherds of the enlightened race of Atlantis “and they managed to graze, because they were with their flocks in the mountains, when all the rest of the earth sank into the abyss of the ocean. Personally, the author of Islands Untouched by Time himself notes with regret: “For the time being, I must refute the theory of the existence of Atlantis, although this does not give me pleasure. It has too much fantasy. Geologists have proven that the Canary Islands are not part of a submerged continent, but volcanic peaks of the Tertiary period. Soundings between the islands and the African coast revealed such depths that even if there ever was a “continental bridge”, it was washed away long before people appeared on earth ... "

One can enumerate dozens of domestic and foreign scientists of the 19th-20th centuries who connected in one knot the evidence for the existence of Atlantis and the legend of Plato, and the island "remains" of the disappeared mainland (or large island), and the high growth of white-skinned and blue-eyed Guanches - "Atlanteans", carriers of the Cro-Magnon racial type, and the megalithic buildings of the Guanches, and even the mysterious “whistling language”, which the Atlanteans allegedly owned. The Frenchman G. Poisson wrote in 1945 that ancient population Western Europe - Cro-Magnons, who were tall (more than 190 cm) - could come to Europe only from Atlantis, and that the memories of these tall tribes were preserved in the memory of peoples as memories of mythical giants and giants. It is no coincidence, in his opinion, that even the ancient Greeks considered all megalithic stone structures to be the work of the Cyclopes giants who disappeared after the flood, and as a tribute to this legendary tradition, historians and archaeologists still call such megalithic structures “cyclopean” ...

And even earlier, the Englishman L. Spence even drew a picture of the multiple migrations of the Atlanteans to the New and Old Worlds and associated with these waves of giant aliens a number of archaeological cultures that succeeded each other throughout the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. According to him, the first such migration from Atlantis took place around 25-30 thousand years BC. e., when in Europe, inhabited by wild Neanderthals, people of the modern type suddenly appeared - Cro-Magnons. Approximately about 14 thousand years BC. e. the second wave of the Atlanteans brought the high Aurignac culture to the Old World, then the last "advent" of the Atlanteans to Europe happened, about 8 thousand years BC. e. (a date close to the time of the alleged death of Atlantis), which brought here the same high culture of Azil-Tardenoise (the names are given according to the French sites where these archaeological cultures were discovered).

According to the “Atlantomaniacs”, similar migrations were sent from Atlantis to America, which is explained in the myths of the American Indians about the appearance from the east of “white gods” and heroes who gave the American Indians culture, art, science (for example, the “cultural hero” of a number of Central American Indians - Quetzalcoatl). Referring to anthropological studies of the ancient skulls of North American Indians, Poissen even proved the similarity of dolichocephalic (long-headed) Indians North America with the Cro-Magnons of Western Europe and the Guanches of the Canary Islands. This made it possible to later include in the system of evidence the mysterious language of the whistle of the Indians. Central America, the Guanches of the Canary Islands and the inhabitants of Northwest Africa.

Indeed, whistling languages ​​in such a context could serve as one of the evidence for the existence of either Atlantis, or brisk maritime contacts between the Old and New Worlds, dating back, perhaps, from the Stone Age, at least from the Neolithic (which is categorically disputed by sober-minded historians culture, archaeologists, historians of geography). This would be so if the whistling languages ​​were found only on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, on its American and European coasts. But ... however, we will return to this in the next chapter of our story, and now we can move from “semi-fantastic” hypotheses to directly “fantastic”, the Guanches clinging to the phenomenon with a death grip and their mysterious whistling language ...

We are talking about even more fantastic assumptions by some science fiction writers and supporters of the so-called "fantastic archeology and history" about the origin of the Guanches and the whistle language in the Canary Islands. For example, the Frenchman R. Sharru and the Swiss E. Deniken, already familiar to the reader from the film “Memories of the Future”, ( The reader read about them in more detail in the previous "tale of criminal archeology" - "In the footsteps of grave robbers" (see the chapters "Do not sell Atlantis!" and "Conspiracy against history") expressed an unconfirmed opinion about the Guanches as feral descendants of white-skinned, blond and blue-eyed "aliens from space" who arrived on our planet in time immemorial, either from Venus and Mars, or from another star system and galaxy - along the highway ... " Earth - Sirius. At the same time, they refer to the mysterious language of whistling, as a kind of "Esperanto of the Universe", which the "newcomers" allegedly mastered perfectly, and to some mysterious and still inexplicable phenomena associated with the Atlantic and the Canary Islands.

Firstly, they believe that these islands have always been the "promised land", the Islands of the Blessed, that "the gods often gave them their visits." Moreover, they draw their evidence from the well-known "Atlantomaniac Bible", the book by I. Donel-lee "Atlantis, the antediluvian world", published at the end of the 19th century in London (last edition - 1949). At one time, this author completely "revised" the entire world history from one angle of view - in any way to prove the existence of Atlantis. Here, and not anywhere else, according to Donelly, was the Greek Olympus, and the biblical "paradise" and "promised land" of all the peoples of the world. From here, then, the high culture of the Atlanteans spread throughout the world. And the gods and "cultural heroes" of the world's religions and all sorts of legends and myths are just deified Atlanteans, "cultural tragers" of the planet Earth. All civilizations of antiquity - Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru - where there was writing, megaliths, monuments, cities - these are just colonies once founded by the inhabitants of Atlantis, its "deaf backyards", the province of the true center of world civilization ... "Aliens" only updated Donnelly, attributing all this not to their earthlings, the mythical Atlanteans, but, according to the "spirit of the times" and the "fashion" of the space age, to the same mythical "aliens from outer space".

Supporters of "fantastic archeology" are also speculating on ancient ancient and later medieval traditions, linking the "magical past" of the Atlantic (beginning with the "death of Atlantis") and its "cosmic present" into a single ball of sensations. It is no coincidence, they write, that the ancients were so afraid of the Atlantic, calling it the Sea of ​​Darkness, and it is no coincidence that “the mystery Bermuda Triangle was born and exists in this, and not in any other ocean of the planet. True, they forget that for the ancient Mediterranean civilization, on the basis of which European civilization arose, Atlantic Ocean was "his", close and frightening, the true Sea of ​​Darkness. And whether in his place Indian or Pacific Oceans, - history would repeat itself again, because the result does not change from a change in the places of the terms ...

In the load of “Atlantic sensations” that causes laughter or bewilderment, a certain place is given to the Canary Islands and the mysterious Guanches with their even more mysterious whistling language, which, of course, are located almost in the center of the waters of the mysterious Atlantic. It is worth recalling another “mystery” of the Canary Islands, which supporters of “fantastic archeology” like to refer to, and try to explain it without resorting to “cosmic devilry”, but based on ordinary, “earthly” ideas.

... We are talking about one still unclear place from the diaries of the helmsman of the expedition that discovered the Canary Islands - Niccoloso da Recco. Here is what he said after his return to Europe, as the famous Boccaccio reports about this:

“On one of the islands they discovered,” the author of the Decameron writes with surprise, “the sailors discovered something so amazing that they did not land. They say that there is a mountain on this island, which, according to their calculations, rises 30 miles, if not more, and is visible at a very great distance. Something white was visible on the top of the mountain and it looked like a fortress, and the whole mountain was strewn with rocks. On top of a very pointed rock there is a mast of the same size as on a ship, and on it is a yard with a large Latin sail. This sail, blown by the wind, is shaped like an upright shield with a coat of arms, and it deploys quickly. The mast itself then slowly lowers, as in a galley, then straightens up, throws back again and rises again. The sailors traveled around this island and saw from all sides how this miraculous phenomenon was repeated. Confident that they were dealing with some kind of sorcery, they did not dare to go ashore. They saw many other things there, which the named Niccoloso did not want to talk about ... "

It is difficult to understand what the brave Spanish and Italian sailors on the island actually saw and what they were afraid of. Maybe it was some kind of sanctuary of the Guanches, worshiping, as it is known among many peoples of the world, the fire and smoke of active volcanoes? Back in the VI century. BC e. in the same waters, the Carthaginian fleet of Sufet Gannon sailed, heading for some kind of "Feon-Ochema" ("Chariot of the Gods" - they also see a rocket of "space aliens" in it) or "Feon-Oikema" - "Residence of the gods", "Abode gods" or "mountain of the gods". Historians of geography consider Feon-Ohemu, or Feon-Oikema, one of the active volcanoes either on the Canary Islands (Pic de Teide, on the island of Tenerife - height 3718 m), or on the coast of Africa (for example, Cameroon volcano - height 4075 m). Most likely, it was the last one, since the inhabitants of Cameroon still call their fire-breathing volcano “Mongo ma loba”, that is, “Mountain of the Gods” or “Cave of the Gods”. This is quite applicable to many active volcanoes, in which almost all primitive tribes saw and still see the “abode of the gods”, and the fire-breathing crater is often called the “cave of the gods”.

It is no coincidence that the well-known cults of fire-breathing mountains among local peoples, which were based on natural phenomena, influenced the emergence of countless myths about high “fire towers” ​​mentioned by Arab geographers in connection with the Canary Islands, the Moroccan or Spanish coasts (after all, Arab sailors, like known from their chronicles and legends, more than once observed volcanic eruptions in the local waters). Indeed, in 1922, the Cameroon volcano, hitherto considered extinct for a long time, with all the fury of powerful lava flows, proved that it is “the true“ Mongo ma loba ”, the true“ Mountain of the Gods ”. Its eruption, as observers reported, was very similar to that described in his famous Periplus by the Carthaginian Hanno ...

And maybe - and this is the truest of all! - on the top of one of the highest mountains, a sail was installed on the mast from the ship of one of the unknown sailors who disappeared, like many others, at the dawn of the era of the great geographical discoveries, in the blue loneliness of the Atlantic. After all, at that time it was not cut by the keel of any of the ships of the Mediterranean! Some sources have preserved for us the names of these first Columbuses and the first Robinsons of the Atlantic, who left the saving shores, abandoned coastal voyages and set off to look for ways to distant fabulous India. But never returned to their native harbors on the Mediterranean!

So, about fifty years before the second discovery of the Canary Islands, the Genoese, the Vivaldi brothers, left on two equipped galleys somewhere to the west, to the Atlantic, and disappeared into its expanses. Until now, uncertainty shrouds the expedition of these first Columbuses, who ventured at their own peril and risk to pave the way to India, long before Vasco da Gama and Columbus. These short epitaphs from medieval chronicles serve as the only monument to these brave sailors who went missing in 1291.

“In that same year, Tedisio Doria, Ugolino Vivaldi and his brother, with some other citizens of Genoa, began to prepare for a journey that no one else had attempted before. And they equipped two galleys in the best possible way ... and sent them to Ceuta in May to sail across the ocean in Indian countries… This surprised not only eyewitnesses, but also those who heard about it. After they rounded the cape called Gozora (modern Cape Jubi. - G. B.), nothing more reliable was heard about them. May the Lord preserve them and bring them to their homeland healthy and unharmed.”

Who knows if the Vivaldi brothers and their companions turned out to be Robinsons on one of the Canary Islands and hoisted a mast on top of a mountain to signal their stay on the island? Although the sailors had no hope that some random ship would pick them up: after all, they were the first of the Europeans to leave their Mediterranean cradle and enter the desert Atlantic. It is no coincidence that in 1312, during the re-discovery of the eastern group of the Canary Islands by the Genoese Lanzarote Malocello (now one of the Canary Islands bears his name), a small rocky island located north of about. Lanzarote was named after the ship that participated in the Vivaldi expedition, the galley Alegranza. Why this ship and not another? Maybe it is on the rocks about. Alegranza and found their last harbor of the Vivaldi expedition, and Lanzarote managed to find their wreckage and read the inscription of the lost ship? Giving this name to the insidious island, Lanzarote thus, twenty years later, honored the memory of the missing members of the Vivaldi expedition ...

Of course, the description of this operating “sail-like” device sounds strange, it can be consciously set in motion by the descendants of the Robinsons (quite possibly saved by the Guanches and left to live in their tribe), or by the islanders themselves, who saw in a mast with a sail, hitherto unknown to them, some specific magical ritual of "newcomers from across the sea" and blindly repeating it. After all, the Guanches themselves, who knows how to get to the islands and take root on them, have long ceased to be engaged in navigation and forgot about ships, boats and sails. There is no “cosmic riddle” that so frightened the experienced sailors of the expedition of 1341, as the supporters of “fantastic archeology” believe, is here and could not be ...

We also understand the fear that the strange device caused among the sailors. In the light of those legends and ideas about the Sea of ​​Darkness, frightening stories of medieval sailors in taverns and taverns of port cities about the intrigues of the devil in relation to "innocent Christian souls", etc., they were psychologically ready for miracles and witchcraft. And naturally, expecting all sorts of “dirty things” from the islands and the islanders themselves, they received them in the form of “ active sail and masts,” and, not really understanding what was the matter, but believing in a miracle, they hurried to leave the island. Apparently it was about. Tenerife - only there such a huge mountain towered, the height of which was so fantastically exaggerated with fright: instead of 3.7 km - 30 miles!

Not the antenna of the "spaceship" and not the locator installation of the "aliens", as if erected on top of the high mountain Canarian archipelago, were the cause of confusion for the Spanish and Italian sailors. The ghost of Magnetic Mountain and the ominous Bronze Horseman of the Atlantic still stood in the eyes of medieval sailors when they saw the strange sail mast. This, and nothing else, can explain the cowardice of the sailors, who are absolutely sure that "they are dealing with some kind of witchcraft." It is no coincidence that, in order not to be branded as a liar, named Niccoloso, having seen "much more" - fear has big eyes! I didn't want to talk about it...

As for the mysterious whistling language of the Guanches of the Canary Islands, the answer to this question is closely connected with the question of the origin of the Guanches themselves, with their subsequent ethnogenesis. Not "aliens from outer space", who allegedly spoke the whistling "Esperanto of the Universe", but any of the above-mentioned peoples, ancient history and whose ethnography is practically unknown, could bring the mysterious whistling language to the Canary Islands:

undersized and dark-skinned pygmies-Africans or "Bushmen" of the Sahara and North-West Africa (especially since this language is ethnographically attested on this ancient continent of the planet - in West Africa, and in ancient times it could be much more widely distributed along the entire coast - all the more that ancient authors pointed to his “timid traces”);

mysterious Guanches, people from North Africa or Europe, whose genealogy is lost for centuries and awakens the fantasy and imagination of scientists;

Mediterranean travelers who accidentally or deliberately ended up in the Canary Islands and founded their settlements in this Atlantic archipelago;

the Berber-Libyans of Northwest Africa, who lived in the neighborhood of the Canary Islands and, apparently, penetrated the islands;

finally, the whistle language could have arisen independently in the Canary Islands, depending on the way of life and economy of the islanders, the lack of more reliable means of communication in conditions of rugged terrain.

Was the whistling language "invented" by the white Cro-Magnon Atlanteans, as the "Atlantomaniacs" believe, and transmitted from one "Atlantic center" to the shores of the Bay of Biscay (to Bearn), the Canary Islands and to North-West and West Africa, and in the New World - to the Indians of Central America? This question could be answered positively if the named whistle languages ​​turned out to be a kind of linguistic phenomena that are not found anywhere else in the world - far from the Atlantic - but ...

There are three nationalities on the globe - Guanches, Basques and Etruscans, the mystery of whose origin remains an unsolved mystery for many scientists to this day.

Some researchers-atlantologists are also attracted by the mystery of the origin of the Guanches, the inhabitants who inhabited the archipelago of thirteen large and small Canary Islands. Not far from them is the mainland - Africa. In windless clear weather, being on the African coast, you can see cumulus clouds clinging to the peak of Pic de Teide - the highest and beautiful volcano Canar (3718 meters), towering on the island of Tenerife.

This and other inhabited islands of the archipelago keep evidence of a turbulent volcanic past: gorges filled with lava flows; black rocks with basalt gruss and scales of volcanic crusts at their foot; old and new craters, lava plateaus. The islands are separated by deep water straits.

The history of the discovery and settlement of the Canaries is more complicated than that of the Azores or the Madeira Islands. The Canary Islands have long been known to the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Greeks. The latter, as well as the Romans, identified them with the Happy Isles of their myths. Later, they were apparently visited by Arab sailors.

As you know, the first Europeans who entered the Middle Ages on the land of the Happy Isles in 1312 were Italians. And then, when they started talking about the islands in Europe, in 1341, an expedition of Genoese and Spanish sailors was equipped with the money of the Portuguese crown. Then the Spaniards and the Portuguese vied with each other for dominance in the Canaries. The Spaniards, who own the Canary Islands to this day, won.

Thus began the history of the discovery of the Canary Islands and the history of their centenary (!) Conquest. Indeed, there is something to be surprised when you consider that their natives, the Guanches, were armed with only stone and wooden weapons. With almost bare hands, they fought against the Spanish invaders clad in armor and armed with firearms.

At the beginning of the Spanish conquest in 1402, the population of the Canary Islands was about 20 thousand people. In the memory and reminiscences of many witnesses, vivid and memorable pictures of the fierce struggle of the islanders for their freedom remained. The Guanches always fought to the end, and if they surrendered, it was only to save the lives of their women and children.

In their last battle with the Spaniards, most of the Guanches, surrounded by superior enemy forces, threw themselves into the abyss. They "left" only 1.5 thousand women, old people and children to their enemies. 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 islands, Jacques de Betancourt, sent an army there, which, after stubborn battles with the Guanches, finally took possession of the Canaries.

Thus, in 1495, the Guanche guerrilla war ended in the mountains of Tenerife. It is possible that the Guanches would have fought further if their “army” had not suffered a plague epidemic brought by the Spaniards to the island ... The Spaniards settled in the Canary Islands only at the end of the 15th century, when the population of the archipelago was reduced by half. And after 150 years, it was believed that not a single purebred representative of the Guanches remained on the islands.

From this moment, the so-called age-old "Canarian secrets" begin to exist. This is also due to the fact that scientists became interested in the Guanches only when they disappeared from the face of the Earth, leaving behind secrets that have not been solved to this day. Some of these "Canarian mysteries" we will consider below ...

Unfortunately, it is not possible to list all of them in this book. existing hypotheses and opinions about the origin of the Guanches, from the most fantastic (the Guanches are the descendants of aliens?!) to the romantic ones (the Guanches are the descendants of the shepherds of the “enlightened race of Atlantis”, who allegedly managed to escape when their homeland, Atlantis, went into the depths of the ocean) ...

For the first time, the last of the mentioned hypotheses was put forward back in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher, at the beginning of the 19th century, Bory de Saint-Vincent connected Atlantis with the legendary Isles of the Blessed and the very real Canary Islands, and in the 20s of our century, the historian B. Bogaevsky proposed his own version, which we reviewed earlier. The inhabitants of the Canaries themselves, the so-called "white natives", considered themselves the only people in the world who had escaped from a mysterious catastrophe that had happened in the past.

However, anthropological studies have shown that the indigenous population of the Canary Islands was not completely exterminated by the Spaniards. It was partially assimilated by the Franco-Spanish newcomers, and some (albeit insignificant) part of the Guanches remained even unmixed, preserving the purity of their race.

Consequently, the Guanches disappeared not because they were completely exterminated by the Spaniards, but because they mixed with them and other Europeans (Italians, French and Portuguese).

Strange, but between the Canary Islands, separated from each other by straits, there was no sea communication, so life on each of the islands had its own characteristics. The Guanches - representatives of the ocean - did not even build primitive boats, although there was plenty of wood on the islands necessary for this.

True, the Guanches swam well, but not so well as to swim to their islands, for example, from the African mainland. In a word, the Guanches turned out to be the only island people in the world who did not have any sailing skills and did not know what the expression "to sail the sea" means.

At the same time, goats, sheep, dogs and pigs, both domestic and feral, were found in abundance on the islands. Who brought people and pets to the Canary Islands?

According to the Guanches, the inhabitants of neighboring islands, located so close to each other that visual orientation was possible between them, did not even attempt to establish any connection by sea.

Some scientists believe that the answer to the question of the absence of the process of navigation must be sought in the beliefs and prejudices of the islanders. It is possible that their distant ancestors survived a terrible catastrophe associated with the ocean, after which the categorical demand for the Guanches to strive to conquer the sea was passed from generation to generation.

Short, swarthy and black-haired Spaniards were struck by the appearance of the Guanches. They were white-faced, tall (their average height exceeded 180 centimeters, but there were giants over two meters among them), fair-haired (sometimes with reddish hair), blue-eyed and dressed in red-orange animal skins. It was a very hospitable people who loved music and dancing, good-natured and honest. They lived in stone houses, worshiped, like the Egyptians and Peruvians, the Sun.

It should be noted that anthropologically, the Guanches were very similar to the Cro-Magnons who settled Europe about 30 thousand years ago. Answering the questions of Europeans about their origin, the Guanches said that they were "children of the Sun":

“Our fathers said that God, having settled us on this island, then forgot about us. But one day he will return with the Sun, which he ordered to be born every morning and which gave birth to us.

The culture of the Guanches at the time of their discovery by Europeans was at the Neolithic stage of development. However, the customs of the Guanches, oddly enough, showed an incomprehensible resemblance to the customs of highly cultured ancient peoples. The Guanches had a caste of priests who wore clothes and headdresses the same as the Babylonians. Like the Egyptians, the Guanches knew how to embalm the bodies of the dead and buried them in domed tombs, as did the ancient Greeks. As in Tibet (as well as on some islands of Micronesia), in the Canaries there was polyandry - polyandry.

Like the Aborigines of Australia and the Bushmen South Africa, the Guanches made fire by rubbing wooden sticks. In the Canary Islands, as in ancient Babylon and Peru of the Inca era, the brides of the gods, "sacred virgins", were revered. As for the crafts of this people, they were close to ancient Greek culture.

The Guanches were ruled by ten elected kings, which we observe, by the way, in Atlantis, described by Plato. Even individual Guanche inscriptions 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 small volume, did not allow scientists to decipher them ...

One of the secrets is the strange language of the Guanches. Here, for example, is what the chroniclers of the Frenchman Betancourt reported about this:

“Gomero is the birthplace of tall people who are fluent in the most wonderful of all languages. They speak with lips as if they had no tongue at all. These people have a legend that they, innocent of anything, were severely punished by the king, who ordered them to cut out their tongues. Judging by the way they talk, this legend can be trusted.”

The fact is that the Guanches of the Canaries, especially on the islands of Gomero, Hierro, Tenerife, could communicate with each other with the help of ... a whistle at a distance of 14 kilometers! And these were not some prearranged signals, but the most living spoken language in which one could gossip - as much as one wanted and about anything. Linguists today cannot find a single "relative" to the strange language of the Guanches...

One of the main mysteries of the Guanches is: how did a people not familiar with navigation get to the Canary Islands? ..

Probably the settlement of these mysterious islands It did not take place over a solid “bridge” of land stretching to the so-called sunken Canarida, since geological evidence indicates that the Canaries volcanic archipelago was formed many millions of years ago. Apparently, this settlement was carried out along a chain of islands and islets that have now disappeared. Moreover, two ways were possible for this: one - from the southern part of Europe, the second - from West Coast Africa.

The Cro-Magnons lived in the Ice Age, when the level of the World Ocean was about 150-200 meters lower than the current one, and all the now shallow areas of the African shelf were dry land. So the way to the Canary Islands was easier than now. But, most likely, the ancestors of the Guanches came to these islands from Africa, and not from Spain ...

In the Canary Islands, however, researchers have found, as already mentioned, traces of writing in the rock carvings. Who and when left these inscriptions or written signs here? In what language of the world were they written? All these questions are also included in the series of "Canarian riddles" ...

In conclusion, we will talk about one (quite probable!) possibility of explaining (from purely anthropological positions) the “fair-haired” and “blue-eyed” Guanches. So anthropologists have long noticed one strange, but natural feature - in endogamous groups isolated for a long time (marriage within groups), there is often, one might say, an automatic increase in individuals with blond hair and eyes. The Guanches, who somehow got to the Canary Islands in ancient times, who lived in almost complete isolation from the rest of humanity, are an example of such a population.

Due to its geographical isolation from European continent The Canarian archipelago remained in the shadow of world history all its life. Nothing worthy of the pages of textbooks happened here, with the exception, perhaps, of Columbus, who visited for several days. It so happened that the Canaries became the last refuge of the navigator before crossing the ocean and discovering the New World.

The Canary Islands bear little resemblance to the "real" Spain, which tourists usually associate with bullfighting, flamenco, seething passions and other clichés. All this is not held in high esteem in the Canary Islands.
Bullfighting was liquidated in 1991 as a phenomenon alien in spirit, and no one went to it before the official ban. And under the most incendiary Canarian dance, you can fall asleep even in the first minutes.

The Canaries have always been on their own. A self-sufficient and original province, which is of little interest to what is happening around. Surprisingly, even today most local residents never left the archipelago...

Much more interesting is the alternative point of view on the origin of the island. According to her, Tenerife (like all other Canary Islands) is all that survived from the legendary Atlantis after a grand earthquake. The continent went under water, and only the tops of the mountains with a handful of surviving Atlanteans remained on the surface.
Academic circles frown at the word "Atlantis", but what do we care? We will return to her.

A long time ago

The existence of the Canary Islands has been known since ancient times from the stories of sailors and from the writings of historians. Moreover, as usual, everything was shrouded in a veil of mysticism, speculation and outright fairy tales.
And they were called by different names. Here, at the end of the world, in the Garden of the Hesperides, the nymphs hid the golden apples of eternal youth and hosted the Argonauts under the guidance of Jason. On the Isles of the Blessed, people who received immortality from the gods and the righteous found eternal refuge. Again, Plato stirred the immature minds of Atlantis, which he placed exactly in this place.

In the VI century. Irish monk Brendan and his companions went to surf the Atlantic Ocean in search of Eden. On the way they met mysterious land with marvelous trees and animals, which suddenly plunged into the water, it was worth stepping on it. Judging by the description of the neighboring islands, the pilgrims stumbled upon the Canaries.
Since then, the legend of the eighth island under the name of San Brendan (San Borondon) somewhere in the west of the archipelago has been alive. Only a select few are destined to see it, the ghost island hides from all others. It is curious that it is present on some ancient maps, and the number of lucky people who allegedly observed San Brendan with their own eyes is in the thousands.

In the XVI-XVIII centuries. numerous expeditions are organized in order to find the eighth island, always ending in the same way: there are plenty of “eyewitnesses”, San Brendan was not found. In our time, the ghost island has even been photographed and filmed. However, it is very problematic to disassemble anything on these materials.

By the time more or less plausible information began to come about the Canary Islands, they were already inhabited by people of unknown origin. The natives of Tenerife called themselves Guanches.
The Guanches raised goats and sheep, grew barley, fished from the shore, lived mainly in caves and dressed in skins. They did not know metals, simple household utensils (surprisingly reminiscent of Mexican ones) were made of wood, stones and bones.
But if your imagination drew a Neanderthal jumping around a fire with a piece of meat and hooting, the collective image of the native Tenerife has little in common with him.

The Guanches from the north of the island were tall, athletic, blue-eyed blondes. Peaceful but proud. They painted multi-colored petroglyphs on the rocks (possibly writing, not yet deciphered), decorated their bodies with tattoos and ... mummified the dead as in Ancient Egypt using aromatic herbs also found in Inca mummies near the South American Lake Titicaca.

At the same time, living surrounded by the ocean, the Guanches were afraid of open water. Even with neighboring islands did not communicate. The only island nation in the world that did not have any sailing skills and watercraft. At first, they mistook the caravels of Europeans for unprecedented giant birds ...

Although the Guanches at the household level lived in the Stone Age, they were distinguished by a high social organization under the command of the Mensei - kings. Once upon a time, the whole island was single-handedly ruled by a mensei named Tinerfe El Grande. During the era of his reign, Tenerife reached unprecedented power and prosperity. But everything changed with the death of the leader: the nine sons of Tinerfe divided the island into nine independent kingdoms. Feudal fragmentation and inconsistency in the actions of the Guanches later greatly helped the Spanish conquistadors.

Even the Guanches built stepped pyramids, similar to the Mexican ones. They can be seen in the town of Guimar. True, not everyone is sure of the authorship of the Guanches ... In general, only dots.

There are several scientific versions about the origin of the Guanches. All of them have both arguments "for" and frankly weak points. The main hypothesis is immigrants from North Africa. But then why did the people, once able to get to the islands from the continent with their families and livestock without intermediate stops, suddenly forget what a boat looks like?

But for those who believe in the existence of Atlantis, Guanches are a real gift. The continent sank, several families were saved on the tops of the mountains. Having quickly degraded without the usual amenities to the level of the Stone Age, they, nevertheless, retained even through generations some signs of civilized people.
And the fear of the ocean is not an echo of the tragedy that once befell their continent?

As is known from the myths, part of the Atlanteans survived the catastrophe and dispersed throughout the globe, bringing elements of their culture to other peoples. Maybe this explains the similarity of the customs of the Guanches, American Indians and ancient Egyptians? Logic cannot be denied.

Tall, athletic, strong, fair-skinned - well, why not Atlanteans? By the way, the Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl, who dug up the pyramids in Guimar, was convinced that the Guanches came from some highly developed ancient civilization.

The Guanches bred dogs: large and ferocious. They were used to protect the nobility from permanently dissatisfied plebeians. At the beginning of a new era, inquisitive Moors were brought to the islands, to whom the Guanches presented two dogs. From the Latin word "canis" (dog), the modern name Canaries was formed, literally - "dog". So the canaries have nothing to do with it.

The ancient breed has not survived to this day. But the dogs of Presa Canario (Perro de Presa Canario) today are the closest relatives of those very almost legendary four-legged bodyguards of the hegemons of the Guanches.

For a long time

As European sailors began to swim farther and farther, their interest in the Canary Islands naturally increased. Portugal and Spain - the two maritime "superpowers" of the time - concluded an agreement according to which the Canaries retreated to the Spaniards.

At the beginning of the XV century. began the conquest of the Canary Islands. Tenerife resisted the longest. Some of the Mensei chose to "make friends" with the Spaniards, others fought without sparing their belly. The Guanches turned out to be brave warriors: when there was nothing else to do, they jumped into the abyss, just not to surrender.

At the end of 1495, the conquistadors under the command Alonso Fernandez de Lugo launched a decisive attack on the island, landing in the very place where the capital of Tenerife is now located. After several devastating battles for the Guanches (in the battle of November 14, one thousand seven hundred Guanches died, the losses of the Spaniards amounted to only fifty people) and the suppression of the guerrilla war, the last stronghold of Canarian independence fell.

The Guanches of the north of Tenerife, who put up the most fierce resistance, were sold into slavery. Others were converted to Christianity and made servants. The once proud and freedom-loving people, a hundred years after colonization, disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving a minimum of information about themselves. Dissolved among the "come in large numbers here."

Today, it is fashionable for Canarians to consider themselves descendants of the Guanches, to scold the conquistadors and be proud of the fact that they have the blood of the natives. Many of the geographical names that you are sure to come across on the island are of "pre-war" origin: Güimar, Adeje, Tacoronte, Anaga, Taoro, Icod...

Island of bad luck

After colonization in Tenerife, immigrants from the continent reached out. Accordingly, the question arose of what to do in a foreign land. In those days, sugar was in good demand, and the climate on the island made it possible to grow sugar cane. The thing went. Every suitable piece of land was used for cane plantations, and when the free ones ran out, they began to set fire to pine forests. A little more - and the Tenerife ecosystem would begin to crumble.
But the profitable business was ruined by Columbus, who discovered the neighboring continent: it turned out to be much cheaper to produce sugar in overseas lands.

The Canarians did not lose heart for a long time and vineyards were planted on the site of the former sugar cane plantations. More luck here. Local wines appealed to Europe and became the main article of the Canarian export for many years. However, due to the political situation, the sales market has declined sharply, winemaking has fallen into decay.

Unprecedented prospects were seen by the inhabitants of Tenerife in a tiny insect - cochineal. In nature, cochineal lives on prickly pear cacti on a self-sustaining basis and, when harvested and dried, goes to the production of carmine dye.
The process is laborious, carmine was expensive. Hard-working Canarians took up a new business with enthusiasm. Only the harvesting of insects gained industrial momentum and a lot of money flowed onto the island - the unforeseen happened. Chemists have invented cheap organic dyes. Dreams of a comfortable life once again were not destined to come true.

MYSTERY OF THE CANARY ISLANDS (MIDDLE AGES)

The river of time! For almost a thousand years, busy with its internal affairs, medieval Europe forgot about an old dream - to find in the Western Ocean the "promised land", the fabulous islands of the Blessed, the distant abode of "righteous souls", about which ancient authors wrote so much, In the fever of the crusades, this land from West to East, it is very late, tired and disappointed, having given almost the entire Iberian Peninsula to the Berbers and Arabs and losing the battle for the “Holy Sepulcher”, turned its eyes towards the Atlantic. periplov, - and the maps of medieval sailors were full of the most fantastic names of the islands of the Sea of ​​​​Darkness, whose name they borrowed for a while from the Arab Sinbads. True, the Sinbads did not differ in particular courage in Atlantic enterprises, knowing perfectly only the seas of the Indian Ocean - up to Indonesia and China. The Atlantic remained a strange, distant world for the Arabs, "mare incognitum", as they would say in the Middle Ages. And there were, perhaps, justifying reasons for this. For example, the Arabs knew the ancient authors better than the medieval Europeans and carried the "burden" of the ancient tradition in their ideas about the distant "Western Sea". The ancient tradition, as you know, placed everything distant, alien and monstrous in the “land of darkness”, in the west, where the sun was setting and the “realm of the dead” was located. “There the vault of heaven rests on the waters and Gloom and Horror are born. There is no return to those who dare to swim in these waters, just as there is no return to the dead from the realm of shadows, ”the ancient Greeks said. According to their ideas, the West was a natural "end of the world", where only desperate heroes could go - Hercules, Jason, Odysseus. And what labors the accomplished feats cost them!

How many fables and terrifying stories - about the "frozen" western sea, in which it is impossible for a ship to sail because of the petrified mud covering it or the huge floating fields of algae and islands that suck in ships - the galleys of imagination were taken from ancient times straight into the Middle Ages. Launched from stocks by the still enterprising Phoenicians and Carthaginians in order to scare away "beginner salag sailors" from the sea routes, they carried a charge of impressive information through the "dark centuries" of the early Middle Ages. , were terribly afraid of the mysterious waters of the Atlantic with its "magnetic islands" and the Bronze Horseman, and conveyed their fear to the Italians and Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Normans.

The first Europeans to set foot on the land of the Happy Islands - and this is reliably known! - were Italians, sons of the free Republic of Genoa. “There (to the Happy Islands), according to the legend of the fathers,” the famous Petrarch allegedly wrote, “the armed fleet of the Genoese landed.” It happened in 1312. Then, when the islands were again learned in Europe, in 1341 a new sea expedition was equipped with the money of the Portuguese crown, consisting of Genoese and Spanish sailors who already knew the way to the “purple west”.

Of course, the Genoese and Spaniards, who once again discovered the Canary Islands, did not find on them a trace of little cheerful black "imps" - the memory of them at that time was kept by the still undiscovered frescoes of Tassili. On the contrary, a tall, blond and blue-eyed people lived in the Canary Islands - the mysterious Guanches, who managed to disappear in the fire of conquest before scientists figured out the secret of their origin. Unfortunately, as happened more than once in history, they shared the sad fate of those who were destroyed by the European conquistadors who were not afraid of either God or the devil - she and the Yagans of Tierra del Fuego, the inhabitants of Tasmania and many other peoples not named here ...

What else became known in Europe about the Guanches, except that they were "savages" dressed in the skins of goats and dogs, which they ate, and that they had agriculture?

By the time of the arrival of the French (Norman) and Spanish conquerors, equipped with firearms, the islanders lived in the truest sense of the word in the Stone Age. They made axes and spearheads from "volcanic glass", obsidian, which was mined on the slopes of the mountains. They did not know metal tools at all, and this made a great impression on the Europeans - white people living in the Stone Age ... In addition, the Guanches were excellent slingers, and the sling replaced their bow with arrows. Under the influence of the newcomers, the Guanches began to make shields from the wood of the “dragon tree”. Apparently, the Guanches did not know the potter's wheel, as they made dishes by hand molding. They made awls and needles from goat bones. They also had wooden bowls and spoons, known in Europe since the Paleolithic. Animal bones were used to make spearheads, harpoons and fishhooks. Since the islanders did not have boats (although they crossed small straits between the islands by swimming or on logs), they fished from the shore on a hook. Sometimes they arranged driven fishing, directing it by swimming into the nets placed in the bays. At night, they beamed fish, blinding them with torches soaked in seal oil, and stringing them on harpoons. In small isolated bays, fish were poisoned with white poisonous juice of a cactus-euphorbia.

One of the mysterious features of the Guanches was, with the overall appearance of the Neolithic culture, the ability to mummify the corpses of the dead, which, as you know, is characteristic only of highly developed peoples, such as the ancient Egyptians or the Incas of South America. The Guanches did this with the help of the juice of the famous “dragon tree”, which was once hunted by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Libyans, and in the Middle Ages by the Spaniards and Italians. The Guanches themselves deified the "dragon tree", and if it died of old age, this, in their opinion, foreshadowed misfortune. Golden hair, Lawrence Green writes, for which Venetian beauties were famous in the Middle Ages, owes its origin to a special dye, the main ingredient of which was “dragon's blood” - the famous blood-red juice of the famous tree. In addition, European healers highly valued this composition for its antiseptic properties and took a lot of money for medicines prepared on its basis (for example, tree sap was mixed with grape alcohol and the resulting mixture was used in the treatment of stomach or skin ulcers).

Here we will give the floor to the person who himself visited the Canaries and collected a lot of information about the Guanches, their way of life, customs and beliefs. Lawrence Green, already familiar to us, says: “Scientists believe that the Guanches colonized these islands a long time ago. They were tall blondes with white skin, and their women were distinguished by a very beautiful figure; their hair, like that of men, was blond, red or chestnut, and they retained this hair color for centuries. Getting here for the first time, travelers expected to meet an African type, but found a Caucasoid one. And not only the color of the skin, but also the character of the Guanches resembled Europeans. All the islands were inhabited. Despite some differences between the inhabitants of individual islands, they were all similar to each other and spoke dialects of the same language. It would be most correct to assume that the Guanches came to the islands from the sea. But how? They didn't have boats. And in fact, they did not understand navigation so much that they were horrified at the mere thought of sailing or rowing from one island to another ... "

The Guanches were good swimmers, as reported by the Spaniards in the 15th century, so good that they easily covered the nine miles that separated Lanzarote from the small desert island of Graciosa. Still, this does not explain the problem in any way, because the closest islands to the African mainland, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, are still sixty miles away. How did the Guanches get to the Canary Islands: along the once-existing land bridge, as some researchers suggest (but this bridge, according to geologists, disappeared even at a time when there was no man on the planet). Or maybe there are other reasons behind the neglect of seafaring skills?

As one of the historians of geography, K. Sapper, believed, “the most ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands undoubtedly sailed on ships from the African mainland. But since the coast was not conducive to navigation, and the territory of the islands satisfied all the needs of the inhabitants, they, not experiencing an extreme need for external relations, forgot the art of navigation. However, it can be assumed, agreeing with the opinion of this researcher, that the disappearance of nautical art among the Guanches, among whom Phoenician-Carthaginian settlers were added, was influenced by the events of the era of “civil unrest” in Carthage, when it was decided to liquidate the distant overseas colony and destroy its inhabitants - colonists. Then, in the very act of banning navigation among the inhabitants of the Canary Islands and in its actual thousand-year oblivion, there are quite understandable reasons - the rejection of ties with the homeland that betrayed the colonists and the desire to protect themselves from possible invasions from the sea. However, in the XIV-XV centuries, this did not help the Guanches to “hide low” and even avoid a brutal massacre, when most of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands were exterminated and until they completely disappeared from the face of the earth. The last Guanches still remained on the islands in the 17th century, although they no longer used their native language, having completely switched to Spanish ...

But let us again give the floor to Lawrence Greene. He writes that everyone agreed that the Guanches “were a wonderful people, although with somewhat strange customs. The Guanches stood out: to know, warriors and peasants. They told the conquerors that God created people from earth and water, men and women equally, and gave them flocks of sheep to sustain life. After that, several more men were made, but they did not receive sheep. God told them:

Serve both and they will feed you.

Noble people could not marry people of low birth, and if there was no one whom a noble could marry without defiling the purity of his family, brothers married sisters. Some chronicles say that the representatives of the nobility were white-skinned, and the peasants were dark-skinned.

By chance, these "dark-skinned" people were not a remnant of the population of the Canary Islands, more ancient than the Guanches, whose traces vaguely appear during archaeological excavations (the French researcher R. Verno wrote about the local "pygmies", as we have already said)? Indeed, if you read the memories of eyewitnesses, you can see that not all Guanches were "white gods." It is possible that some local undersized and dark-skinned population, akin to the “cave Ethiopians” of West and North Africa, remained on the islands, and perhaps representatives of other anthropological types and cultures, starting from the Cretans, accidentally or deliberately remained and mixed with the Guanches. Mycenaean sailors and ending with the Berbers and Arabs. And about the foundation of settlements and purple-dyed Carthaginians and Libyans on the islands, we find direct indications in the sources ...

The Spaniards and French of Betancourt, who took part in the conquest of the islands, which lasted almost a hundred years, considered the Guanches downright giants, and they really were a head, or even two, taller than the undersized inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. It must be assumed that the conquerors got hard from the Guanches, even armed with only stone and wooden weapons. Gran Canaria, or the Grand Canary Island, writes Green, is actually half the size of Tenerife's largest island, but it is called "the Great" because here the Guanches resisted Spanish intervention more fiercely than the inhabitants of other islands. The chronicles of the conquerors told about the islanders that they ran faster than horses and were able to jump over rather deep gorges. Even the women of the Guanches were brave and strong warriors and threw a lot of soldiers into the abyss from the rocks ...

Vivid and memorable descriptions of the fierce struggle of the islanders for their freedom still shock the reader of the chronicles of the first conquistadors of the Atlantic. The Guanches always fought to the last warrior, and if they did surrender, it was only to save the lives of women and children. Judge for yourself how fierce their struggle was, if during the eighty years of this war of extermination on the "Great" island, the Guanche army decreased from 14 thousand to 600 people. In their last battle, most of the warriors threw themselves into the abyss, surrounded by superior enemy forces, leaving the enemy with only one and a half thousand women, old people and children. And in the mountains of Tenerife, the guerrilla war of the Guanches lasted until the end of 1495, and they would have fought longer if their army had not suffered an epidemic of plague brought by the Spaniards to the islands. Indeed, if a series of books “The Life of Remarkable Peoples” were published, the Guanches would rightfully belong to one of the first places, as one of the most freedom-loving and courageous peoples of the world, who adequately met the onslaught of European colonizers and died in an unequal struggle for freedom ...

“Since then, the Guanches,” writes L. Green, “virtually ceased to exist: some were killed in battles, others were driven into slavery. The conquerors took possession of their women and robbed them. Thus disappeared from the face of the earth, having carried away the mystery of its origin, the Neolithic race, which for almost a hundred years was able to provide worthy resistance to the invaders armed with firearms.

What do scientists think of the Guanche ancestry? Here are some of the theories of their origin, and it should be noted that there are a lot of these theories - even absolutely fantastic ones, which have nothing to do with genuine science. It is known that the pure anthropological type of Guanches disappeared in the 16th century, but its features are still manifested on the islands among the descendants of mixed marriages. Lawrence Green writes: “... on the streets of Tenerife, my friends showed real blondes flashing among burning brunettes. And in general, in various parts of the island, people who knew that I was interested in Guanches often suddenly stopped my attention:

Look, a real guanche!

And he was always a man with blond hair and blue eyes, completely different from the Canarians of Spanish origin.

As you know, in determining the anthropological or racial type, skull measurements play an important role. Professor Verno, already mentioned by us, once studied a huge number of Guanche skulls found in their mountain burials. His conclusion shocked scientists: the Guanches should be attributed to the most ancient race of Europe, because they can be considered, on the basis of anthropometric data, the direct remains of the Cro-Magnon man who replaced the Neanderthals. Measurements of the skulls of Cro-Magnons and Guanches reveal so many similarities that one can speak of their direct relationship (in addition, the flint and wooden tools of the islanders, both found in the caves where they once lived, and those that remained from the 15th century, are almost identical Cro-Magnon). It turns out, in his opinion, that the Guanches are an ancient relic of distant historical eras, because the Cro-Magnons, the people of the Stone Age, appeared in Europe in the Ice Age, replacing the regressing Neanderthals, the last groups of which eventually died out or were destroyed by the Cro-Magnons - these first "accelerates in history, our ancestors.

According to Verno, during the advent of the Neolithic and the new Neolithic tribes with a new stone industry and a semi-agricultural type of culture, when the movement of population began in Europe, the Cro-Magnons were pushed south; for some time they lived in Spain, then moved to North Africa, and then migrated to the Canary Islands, where, as a relic, they remained in island isolation. True, there are many “buts” in his too “bold” hypothesis.

Indeed, the disappearance of the Cro-Magnon man, a pure “homo sapiens” who replaced the “still non-human” Neanderthal, is a mystery in itself, which is explained by the fact that this type did not survive, not because the Cro-Magnons were destroyed by someone or died out, but because that over time, as a result of migrations and displacements, he evolved into the modern type of man. That is, we are the descendants of that same Cro-Magnon man, and some of us in different countries of the world to a greater or lesser extent keep his individual “primordial features” (in the structure of the skull, skeleton, etc.).

For example, quite recently, a sensational article was published in a French anthropological journal stating that the most ancient Cro-Magnon type of man, the largest complex of his features, was preserved in Europe by the descendants of the ancient Iberians - modern Basques, considered a remnant of the Franco-Cantabrian branch of the population of the Upper Paleolithic. ( As researchers have known for a long time, the Basques differ from Europeans not only in their language, which does not find analogies with any of the European languages, but also in their anthropological type, which is different from the type of the average European. The same applies, as recently shown by studies by French anthropologists J. Bernard and J. Ruffy (Academy of Medicine), to their blood. Both scholars prove this on the basis of the “Blood Map” of the peoples of Western Europe compiled by them as a result of many years of work, on which the areas inhabited by the Basques (Spain and France) stand out in particular. Unlike other parts of Europe, for example, the zero blood group and the negative Rh factor prevail here, while the B blood group is practically not found at all. According to French anthropologists, this, without a doubt, means that the Basques form a closed national group with little (or no!) relation to the European population groups living around. In addition, the anthropological type of the Basques, compared by known features with the Cro-Magnons (their skulls and skeletons are known to scientists), makes Bernard and Ruffy classify the Basques as a type of "very similar to the Cro-Magnon man."). This population, in addition to the Basques of the Iberian Peninsula, partly includes the North African Berbers, descendants of the ancient Libyans (the languages ​​of the Basques and Berbers apparently have common roots and origins).

By the way, the highlanders of Bearn, where the European equivalent of Homer's silbo was discovered, have always aroused great interest among ethnographers, for example, with their funeral rites (as you know, the most conservative and long-lasting among other ethnographic phenomena among different peoples of the world), their musical instruments, songs and dances, nowhere else in Europe finding analogies, except perhaps among the Basques of Spain. Back in the Middle Ages, in Bearn, as well as in neighboring Navarre and French Gascony, tribes related to the Basques lived, a living relic of the “antediluvian” and once vast Iberian world. Until now, the Bearn dialect is close to Gascon, a branch of the old “Oc language”, which was spoken by the famous Gascon, the hero of Alexandre Dumas, the musketeer d'Artagnan, and a little earlier, Henry IV - the same king of Navarre and France, to whom "Paris cost mass" and Bartholomew night...

In theory, Verno is confused by the fact that he attributed to the Cro-Magnons, in his opinion, the direct ancestors of the Guanches, high seafaring skills, which allowed them to move to the Canary Islands. But in the "Cro-Magnon time", when there was no cattle breeding and agriculture yet, boats were made of the most primitive design, being adapted only for swimming in small rivers and reservoirs. It was impossible to leave the mainland on dugout canoes and rafts and sail to the Canary Islands together with the cattle that did not yet exist. As we saw from the previous material, the development of the wide ocean expanses was only within the reach of a developed maritime civilization - such maritime powers as the Cretans, the "peoples of the sea", the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks. And it is no coincidence that the Europeans, the descendants of the Cro-Magnons, discovered the Canary Islands only in the 14th century. This is the main objection to Verno's concept of the relationship between the Cro-Magnons and the Guanches, or rather, their direct relationship with each other ...

Indeed, later research did not support Vernot's hypothesis, although some of the subsequent theories of the origin of the Guanches were also not very plausible. For example, some researchers consider the Guanches to be immigrants from Europe, brought to the islands only in the 3rd century BC. BC e. a powerful stream of northerners, which then reached the coast of Africa. Others see in them the descendants of the Goths, Vandals or other northern Germanic tribes who were abandoned in the Canary Islands at a certain time of the great migration of peoples at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Still others suggest that Assyrians or Jews could have been ancient settlers, and the author of one “original” theory generally believes that the ancient Egyptians came to Africa directly from ... the Canary Islands (as if this explains the ancient Egyptian custom of mummification, so similar to the embalming of corpses among Guanches). But the authors of these hypotheses forget that all the above-mentioned peoples were much higher in terms of their development than the Guanches and it is not clear why then on the islands they “degraded” and forgot the art of navigation ... In addition, stone tools and other finds found in the Canarian caves , show that the islands were inhabited many millennia ago, and these tools show a certain resemblance to the tools of the Guanches ...

Strange, but few researchers paid attention to the message of ancient Egyptian texts that in 2470-2270. BC e. (Indo-Europeans appeared in Europe at this time of the III-II millennium BC) tribes of blue-eyed and fair-haired, almost red, Libyan Temehu suddenly came to North Africa from somewhere. Further, the Egyptians portrayed the Cretans and other representatives of the famous "peoples of the sea" - excellent sailors and desperate sea pirates, starting somewhere from 1230-1200. BC e, - with blue eyes, in horned Viking helmets" on their heads (such helmets are known from finds in Spain, Corsica and Sardinia; male deities in "horned helmets" were found in Phoenicia, Crete and Cyprus). What, as Henri Lot wrote, says about their "northern origin" ... ( When using such evidence, anthropologists believe, one should always keep in mind that all ancient authors without exception were bad anthropologists and the only standard for assessing the external appearance of the peoples they wrote about was the physical type of their own people. And the Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the Romans are darkly pigmented groups, so they could exaggerate even a slight tendency to depigmentation (lightening) and specifically emphasize, which deprives their "anthropological messages" of the necessary persuasiveness. All this should be taken into account when we are talking or will be talking about the fair-haired and blue-eyed population of certain regions of the Mediterranean, information about which we find in ancient sources, starting with Egyptian texts ...).

In addition, the Phoenicians themselves and their Carthaginian descendants were peoples of mixed origin, formed (the first), according to the German researcher G. Germ, author of the book "Phoenicia - the Purple State", as a result of invasions of nomadic Indo-European tribes, starting with the Hyksos and the Philistines, to the Middle East and mixing them with local Semitic-Hamitic tribes. Moreover, other authors write (D. Baramki, S. Moskati), it was the legendary “peoples of the sea” of the Egyptian chronicles that “created Phoenicia proper from the coastal strip of Lebanon” (according to the formula of S. Moskati, “the Canaanites plus the peoples of the sea are equal to the Phoenicians”) . It is not surprising that among the Phoenicians and their Carthaginian descendants, who also mixed with the blue-eyed and fair-haired Libyans, there was a high percentage of "blonds". Therefore, it is quite possible that the tall and blond Guanches were descendants of any of the above peoples, including the Carthaginians and Libyans, who once settled in the Canary Islands.

We should not forget about another possibility (of a purely anthropological nature) to explain the "fair-haired" and "blue-eyed" Guanches. Anthropologists have noticed a strange feature - in groups isolated for a long time (or populations, as they call them), there is often an automatic increase in the number of individuals with blond hair and eyes, that is, according to them, the so-called "isogametation", or "splitting out of recessive forms ” - resulting in blond hair and blue eyes. Anthropologists cite as examples isolated groups of a once darkly pigmented population that became “blue-eyed blondes” as a result of isolation (for example, the Nuristanis of Iran, some of the peoples of the Caucasus, the Forest Nenets of Western Siberia, etc.).

It seems that the famous Soviet biologist N. I. Vavilov was the first to pay attention to this phenomenon during his travels in search of the "ancestral homes" of many cultivated plants of the Old World. So, among the infidels of Kafirnistan (Afghanistan), he noted this strange phenomenon of depigmentation - “brightening”, which, according to all other indicators, should not seem to be. Vavilov associated this with the closed and long-isolated way of life of the highlanders of Afghanistan, with the effect of closely related marriages (that is, with "limiting the circle of marital ties" in conditions of long isolation from the neighboring population). Today, a similar phenomenon of depigmentation has been discovered by researchers in other closed, isolated groups of our planet: in the mountainous Kashmir - among the Vershik Burishks (Hunza, Gilgit), the Riff-Berbers of the Atlas Mountains (Morocco), the mountain Tajiks of the Pamirs, the Crimean Tatars, etc.

It seems that the Guanches, just belonging to one of such isolated groups for a long time (the inhabitants of some of the Canary Islands generally considered themselves the only people on earth, knowing nothing about the rest of the world), could become “unwittingly blond” as a result of the processes “ isogametation". Therefore, there is no need to make them "original" "blue-eyed Cro-Magnons", since no one has yet proved that Cro-Magnons were "blonde" - after all, one cannot determine the color of the hair from the skulls ...

On the contrary, anthropological materials on those peoples who most of all preserved the “pristine features” of our distant Paleolithic ancestors (Basques, representatives of the Balkan-Caucasian local racial community - Montenegrins, Albanians of high mountain regions, some peoples of the Caucasus), indicate the opposite: the Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon population of Europe - in particular, the Mediterraneans, this oldest formation of the Caucasoid race in general - was darkly pigmented. And the depigmentation or “brightening” of the population first occurred in the north of Europe, and this happened, according to anthropologists, already in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), or even in the Neolithic. Therefore, the Guanches could, while still remaining carriers of the ancient Cro-Magnoid type (according to skulls), eventually turn from dark-pigmented into light-pigmented "blonds with blue eyes." They, from ancient times, who knows how to get to the Canary Islands, lived almost completely apart from the rest of the world, becoming an "isolated population" of the Canary Islands.

When L. Green, who was keenly interested in any information about the mysterious Guanches, or Guanches, as he writes, turned in Las Palmas to one of the authoritative specialists in the history of the islands, Perez Naranyo, he answered him: “In the sixteenth century, one quick-witted Italian sketched the Guanches . These drawings can be seen in the museum. There seems to be some similarity between the Cro-Magnons and the Guanches, but it is impossible to prove this. I hope that someday, as a result of new discoveries, we will learn more about the Guanche language and then we will understand a lot. At the present time, if you make a list of the unsolved mysteries of the world, then the riddle of the Guanches, apparently, will be in the first place in it ... "( As for the language of the Guanches, recently linguists have established that their language is not related to the Berber dialects, to any of the Berber dialects, of which there are more than three hundred. And in general, among today's known languages ​​of the world, linguists have not been able to find "relatives" of the Guanche language. Perhaps a certain lack of materials on this disappeared language is affecting, or perhaps its ancient “relatives” have long since disappeared from the face of the planet, leaving no “offspring” ...).

What other materials speak in favor of the North African origin of the Guanches? First of all, the mysterious and ancient art of mummification of corpses, which, by the time the conquerors arrived on the islands, was preserved by the Guanches (besides them, at that time only the peoples of the New World, especially the Incas and Chibcha-Muisca, owned this art). Lawrence Green in his book devotes a lot of space to mummies among the Guanches, in particular, he writes: “The mummies of the Guanches, apparently, also testify to some of their connections with Ancient Egypt. Three peoples on earth mummified their dead: the Egyptians, the Incas from Peru and the Guanches. It is inconceivable that the Incas or any other of the peoples of South America could, in primitive ships, overcome the trade wind, cross the Atlantic and colonize the Canary Islands. So the Egyptians did it.

The embalming technique of the Egyptians and the Guanches has much in common... The burial of mummies in pyramidal burial grounds also speaks of similarities.” But, as you know, the Egyptians were not blue-eyed and fair-haired and always noted these features in their drawings among neighboring peoples (for example, among the Libyans). And anyone who has been to the museum of Las Palmas, which is more like a mortuary - "legions of tourists come here to stare at the fair-haired Guanches, and go out dumbfounded and shocked" - cannot help but note the yellow, golden, red, dark brown hair of mummies, but never black like the Spaniards. All this fully corresponds to what the first French and Spanish chroniclers, who witnessed the conquest of the islands, said about the islanders. In their opinion, the blond Guanches looked more like blond Swedes than like the inhabitants of such southern latitudes, who lived surrounded by dark-pigmented peoples and next to dark-skinned Africans. It turns out that the Egyptians could not be the ancestors of the Guanches and could not bring their art of mummification of the dead to the islands, unless we assume that they, having got to the islands, somehow “brightened” and “wild” ...

Another thing, if the Guanches are recognized as having a North African origin, then this would explain the art of embalming. According to Pliny the Elder, somewhere else in his time, in the forests beyond the Atlas, lived a tribe of Berber origin known as the "Canaria" - another faint hint, which, as the researchers write, may serve as a clue to unraveling the mystery. Further, in the “pocket dictionary” of the Guanche language, compiled by French monks, the name of one of the Canary Islands in the Guanche language, the island of Marzagan, was preserved. But Marzagan is also found near Agadir in North Africa and is a name of Berber origin. However, like the name of the Rif coast, reminiscent of Tenerife...

All this gives reason to unite the Guanches with the ancient Libyan population of the north of the African continent and the south of the Pyrenees, but not with the "burning brunettes", as Greene writes, who now inhabit the north of Africa, but with those "blonds" who once lived in Southern Europe and North Africa and whom the Egyptians in bygone times called "red-haired Libyans." The latter were always under the strong influence of Ancient Egypt and even conquered it - from there, apparently, they borrowed their "Libyan" art of mummification and embalming of the dead, the ability to build pyramidal burial grounds like the Egyptian pyramids and even the gods of the Nile Valley. Moreover, archaeological excavations at Mersa Matruh speak of an even more ancient similarity between the cultures of pre-dynastic Egypt and the Libyan tribes. Even the settlement of the Nile Valley, according to Henri Lot, who studied the frescoes of Tassili and the culture of their creators, came from the regions of the central Sahara, which was once a flowering garden and homeland, perhaps, of both the Ibero-Libyans and the Egyptians...

Pliny the Elder wrote about some Berber tribe of "Canaries" who lived in the forests beyond the Atlas Mountains, that is, on the coast of North-West Africa opposite from the Canary Islands. Lawrence Green in his book cites a curious passage in which he tries to explain the name of Homer's island (it has nothing to do with the famous Homer, the author of the immortal Iliad and Odyssey). He writes: “Gomera is a strange name, and no one knows exactly where it came from. It is known, however, that in the mountains of the Sahara, where the ancestors of the Guanches may have come from, the Gumero tribe lived. One scholar claimed that the people there knew the language of whistling. Maybe this is so, although it seems to me that the wonderful art of whistling words originated in the gorges of Gomera ... "

Another theory related to the Canary Islands and the "mystery of the Guanches" we owe to ancient times. Of course, we are talking about the “secret of all secrets”, the famous “Atlantis problem” of Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher (teacher of the great Aristotle), who lived in 427-347 years. BC e. From these distant centuries, the genealogy of one of the most interesting, "semi-fantastic" branches of historical science, the so-called "atlantology", and the emergence of two categories of researchers - "atlantomans" (people who blindly believe in the existence of Atlantis) and "atlantophobes" (those who completely denies the existence of "fictitious" and "mythical" Plato's Atlantis - the fruit of his philosophical and sociological theorizing in search of a "model of an ideal state", which, in his opinion, was Atlantis). It is curious that these two currents originated at the same time, in ancient times: apparently, Plato himself belonged to the first, referring to his famous ancestor, “the wisest of the family of the wise”, the Athenian Solon (640-559 BC) ; to the second - a student of Plato, the famous Aristotle, who apparently knew something about the philosophical "kitchen" of his teacher, since he was the first to deny the existence of Plato's "fictitious Atlantis".

We needed this digression from the topic in order to understand, as Lawrence Green writes, the “romantic hypothesis”, according to which the peaks of the Canary Islands are all that remains of the continent of Atlantis, and the Guanches allegedly were once ... shepherds of the enlightened race of Atlanteans "and they managed to graze, because they were with their flocks in the mountains, when all the rest of the earth sank into the depths of the ocean." Personally, the author of Islands Untouched by Time himself notes with regret: “For the time being, I must refute the theory of the existence of Atlantis, although this does not give me pleasure. It has too much fantasy. Geologists have proven that the Canary Islands are not part of a submerged continent, but volcanic peaks of the Tertiary period. Soundings between the islands and the African coast revealed such depths that even if there ever was a “continental bridge”, it was washed away long before people appeared on earth ... "

You can list dozens of domestic and foreign scientists of the 19th-20th centuries who connected in one knot the evidence for the existence of Atlantis and the legend of Plato, and the island "remains" of the disappeared mainland (or large island), and the high growth of white-skinned and blue-eyed Guanches - "Atlanteans", carriers of the Cro-Magnon racial type, and the megalithic buildings of the Guanches, and even the mysterious "whistling language", which the Atlanteans allegedly owned. The Frenchman G. Poisson wrote in 1945 that the oldest population of Western Europe - the Cro-Magnons, who were tall (more than 190 cm) - could come to Europe only from Atlantis and that the memories of these tall tribes were preserved in the memory of peoples as memories of mythical giants and giants. It is no coincidence, in his opinion, that even the ancient Greeks considered all megalithic stone buildings to be the work of the Cyclopes giants who disappeared after the flood, and as a tribute to this legendary tradition, historians and archaeologists still call such megalithic structures “cyclopean”...

And even earlier, the Englishman L. Spence even drew a picture of the multiple migrations of the Atlanteans to the New and Old Worlds and associated with these waves of giant aliens a number of archaeological cultures that succeeded each other throughout the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. According to him, the first such migration from Atlantis took place around 25-30 thousand years BC. e., when in Europe, inhabited by wild Neanderthals, people of the modern type suddenly appeared - Cro-Magnons. Approximately about 14 thousand years BC. e. the second wave of the Atlanteans brought the high Aurignac culture to the Old World, then the last "advent" of the Atlanteans to Europe happened, about 8 thousand years BC. e. (a date close to the time of the alleged death of Atlantis), which brought here the same high culture of Azil-Tardenoise (the names are given according to the French sites where these archaeological cultures were discovered).

According to the “Atlantomaniacs”, similar migrations were sent from Atlantis to America, which is explained in the myths of the American Indians about the appearance from the east of “white gods” and heroes who gave the American Indians culture, art, science (for example, the “cultural hero” of a number of Central American Indians - Quetzalcoatl). Referring to anthropological studies of the ancient skulls of North American Indians, Poissin even proved the similarity of the dolichocephalic (long-headed) Indians of North America with the Cro-Magnons of Western Europe and the Guanches of the Canary Islands. This made it possible then to include in the system of evidence the mysterious whistling language of the Indians of Central America, the Guanches of the Canary Islands and the inhabitants of North-West Africa.

Indeed, whistling languages ​​in such a context could serve as one of the evidence for the existence of either Atlantis, or brisk maritime contacts between the Old and New Worlds, dating back, perhaps, from the Stone Age, at least from the Neolithic (which is categorically disputed by sober-minded historians culture, archaeologists, historians of geography). This would be so if the whistling languages ​​were found only on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, on its American and European coasts. But ... however, we will return to this in the next chapter of our story, and now we can move from “semi-fantastic” hypotheses to directly “fantastic”, the Guanches clinging to the phenomenon with a death grip and their mysterious whistling language ...

We are talking about even more fantastic assumptions by some science fiction writers and supporters of the so-called "fantastic archeology and history" about the origin of the Guanches and the whistle language in the Canary Islands. For example, the Frenchman R. Sharru and the Swiss E. Deniken, already familiar to the reader from the film “Memories of the Future”, ( The reader read about them in more detail in the previous "tale of criminal archeology" - "In the footsteps of grave robbers" (see the chapters "Do not sell Atlantis!" and "Conspiracy against history") expressed an unconfirmed opinion about the Guanches as feral descendants of white-skinned, blond and blue-eyed "aliens from space" who arrived on our planet in time immemorial, either from Venus and Mars, or from another star system and galaxy - along the highway .. "Earth - Sirius". At the same time, they refer to the mysterious language of whistling, as a kind of "Esperanto of the Universe", which the "newcomers" allegedly mastered perfectly, and to some mysterious and still inexplicable phenomena associated with the Atlantic and the Canary Islands.

Firstly, they believe that these islands have always been the "promised land", the Islands of the Blessed, that "the gods often gave them their visits." Moreover, they draw their evidence from the well-known "Atlantomaniac Bible", the book by I. Donel-lee "Atlantis, the antediluvian world", published at the end of the 19th century in London (last edition - 1949). At one time, this author completely "revised" the entire world history from one angle of view - in any way to prove the existence of Atlantis. Here, and not anywhere else, according to Donelly, was the Greek Olympus, and the biblical "paradise" and "promised land" of all the peoples of the world. From here, then, the high culture of the Atlanteans spread throughout the world. And the gods and "cultural heroes" of the world's religions and all sorts of legends and myths are just deified Atlanteans, "cultural tragers" of the planet Earth. All civilizations of antiquity - Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru - where there was writing, megaliths, monuments, cities - these are just colonies once founded by the inhabitants of Atlantis, its "deaf backyards", the province of the true center of world civilization. .. "Aliens" only updated Donnelly, attributing all this not to their earthlings, the mythical Atlanteans, but, according to the "spirit of the times" and "fashion" of the space age, to the same mythical "aliens from outer space".

Supporters of "fantastic archeology" are also speculating on ancient ancient and later medieval traditions, linking the "magical past" of the Atlantic (beginning with the "death of Atlantis") and its "cosmic present" into a single ball of sensations. It is no coincidence, they write, that the ancients were so afraid of the Atlantic, calling it the Sea of ​​Darkness, and it is no coincidence that the "mystery of the Bermuda Triangle" was born and exists in this, and not in any other ocean of the planet. True, they forget that for the ancient Mediterranean civilization, on the basis of which the European civilization grew, the Atlantic Ocean was "their own", close and frightening, the true Sea of ​​Darkness. And if the Indian or Pacific oceans were in its place, history would repeat itself again, because the result does not change from a change in the places of the terms ...

In the load of “Atlantic sensations” that causes laughter or bewilderment, a certain place is given to the Canary Islands and the mysterious Guanches with their even more mysterious whistling language, which, of course, are located almost in the center of the waters of the mysterious Atlantic. It is worth recalling another “mystery” of the Canary Islands, which supporters of “fantastic archeology” like to refer to, and try to explain it without resorting to “cosmic devilry”, but based on ordinary, “earthly” ideas.

We are talking about one, still unclear place from the diaries of the helmsman of the expedition that discovered the Canary Islands - Niccoloso da Recco. Here is what he said after his return to Europe, as the famous Boccaccio reports about this:

“On one of the islands they discovered,” writes the author of the Decameron with surprise, “the sailors discovered something so amazing that they did not land. They say that there is a mountain on this island, which, according to their calculations, rises 30 miles, if not more, and is visible at a very great distance. Something white was visible on the top of the mountain and it looked like a fortress, and the whole mountain was strewn with rocks. On top of a very pointed rock there is a mast of the same size as on a ship, and on it is a yard with a large Latin sail. This sail, blown by the wind, is shaped like an upright shield with a coat of arms, and it deploys quickly. The mast itself then slowly lowers, as in a galley, then straightens up, throws back again and rises again. The sailors traveled around this island and saw from all sides how this miraculous phenomenon was repeated. Confident that they were dealing with some kind of sorcery, they did not dare to go ashore. They saw many other things there, which the named Niccoloso did not want to talk about ... "

It is difficult to understand what the brave Spanish and Italian sailors on the island actually saw and what they were afraid of. Maybe it was some kind of sanctuary of the Guanches, worshiping, as it is known among many peoples of the world, the fire and smoke of active volcanoes? Back in the VI century. BC e. in the same waters, the Carthaginian fleet of Sufet Gannon sailed, heading for some kind of "Feon-Ochema" ("Chariot of the Gods" - they also see a rocket of "space aliens" in it) or "Feon-Oikema" - "Residence of the gods", "Abode gods" or "mountain of the gods". Historians of geography consider Feon-Ohemu, or Feon-Oikema, one of the active volcanoes either on the Canary Islands (Pic de Teide, on the island of Tenerife - height 3718 m), or on the coast of Africa (for example, Cameroon volcano - height 4075 m). Most likely, it was the last one, since the inhabitants of Cameroon still call their fire-breathing volcano “Mongo ma loba”, that is, “Mountain of the Gods” or “Cave of the Gods”. This is quite applicable to many active volcanoes, in which almost all primitive tribes saw and still see the “abode of the gods”, and the fire-breathing crater is often called the “cave of the gods”.

It is no coincidence that the well-known cults of fire-breathing mountains among local peoples, which were based on natural phenomena, influenced the emergence of countless myths about high “fire towers” ​​mentioned by Arab geographers in connection with the Canary Islands, the Moroccan or Spanish coasts (after all, Arab sailors, like known from their chronicles and legends, more than once observed volcanic eruptions in the local waters). Indeed, in 1922, the Cameroon volcano, hitherto considered extinct for a long time, with all the fury of powerful lava flows, proved that it is “the true“ Mongo ma loba ”, the true“ Mountain of the Gods ”. Its eruption, as observers reported, was very similar to that described in his famous Periplus by the Carthaginian Hanno ...

And maybe - and this is the truest of all! - on the top of one of the highest mountains, a sail was set on the mast from the ship of one of the unknown sailors who disappeared, like many others, at the dawn of the era of great geographical discoveries, in the blue loneliness of the Atlantic. After all, at that time it was not cut by the keel of any of the ships of the Mediterranean! Some sources have preserved for us the names of these first Columbuses and the first Robinsons of the Atlantic, who left the saving shores, abandoned coastal voyages and set off to look for ways to distant fabulous India. But never returned to their native harbors on the Mediterranean!

So, about fifty years before the second discovery of the Canary Islands, the Genoese, the Vivaldi brothers, left on two equipped galleys somewhere to the west, to the Atlantic, and disappeared into its expanses. Until now, uncertainty shrouds the expedition of these first Columbuses, who ventured at their own peril and risk to pave the way to India, long before Vasco da Gama and Columbus. These short epitaphs from medieval chronicles serve as the only monument to these brave sailors who went missing in 1291.

“In that same year, Tedisio Doria, Ugolino Vivaldi and his brother, with some other citizens of Genoa, began to prepare for a journey that no one else had attempted before. And they equipped two galleys in the best possible way ... and sent them to Ceuta in May to sail across the ocean to the Indian countries ... This surprised not only eyewitnesses, but also those who heard about it. After they rounded the cape called Gozora (modern Cape Jubi. - G. B.), nothing reliable was heard about them anymore. May the Lord preserve them and bring them to their homeland healthy and unharmed.”

Who knows if the Vivaldi brothers and their companions turned out to be Robinsons on one of the Canary Islands and hoisted a mast on top of a mountain to signal their stay on the island? Although the sailors had no hope that some random ship would pick them up: after all, they were the first of the Europeans to leave their Mediterranean cradle and enter the desert Atlantic. It is no coincidence that in 1312, during the re-discovery of the eastern group of the Canary Islands by the Genoese Lanzarote Malocello (now one of the Canary Islands bears his name), a small rocky island located north of about. Lanzarote was named after the ship that participated in the Vivaldi expedition, the galley Alegranza. Why this ship and not another? Maybe it is on the rocks about. Alegranza and found their last harbor of the Vivaldi expedition, and Lanzarote managed to find their wreckage and read the inscription of the lost ship? Giving this name to the insidious island, Lanzarote thus, twenty years later, honored the memory of the missing members of the Vivaldi expedition ...

Of course, the description of this operating “sail-like” device sounds strange, it can be consciously set in motion by the descendants of the Robinsons (quite possibly saved by the Guanches and left to live in their tribe), or by the islanders themselves, who saw in a mast with a sail, hitherto unknown to them, some specific magical ritual of "newcomers from across the sea" and blindly repeating it. After all, the Guanches themselves, who knows how to get to the islands and take root on them, have long ceased to be engaged in navigation and forgot about ships, boats and sails. There is no “cosmic riddle” that so frightened the experienced sailors of the expedition of 1341, as the supporters of “fantastic archeology” believe, is here and could not be ...

We also understand the fear that the strange device caused among the sailors. In the light of those legends and ideas about the Sea of ​​Darkness, frightening stories of medieval sailors in taverns and taverns of port cities about the intrigues of the devil in relation to "innocent Christian souls", etc., they were psychologically ready for miracles and witchcraft. And naturally, expecting all sorts of “dirty things” from the islands and the islanders themselves, they received them in the form of a “operating sail and mast”, and, not really understanding what was the matter, but believing in a miracle, they hurried to leave the island. Apparently it was about. Tenerife - only there rose such a huge mountain, the height of which was so fantastically exaggerated out of fright: instead of 3.7 km - 30 miles!

Not the antenna of the "spaceship" and not the locator installation of the "aliens", as if erected on top of the highest mountain of the Canary archipelago, were the cause of confusion for the Spanish and Italian sailors. The ghost of Magnetic Mountain and the ominous Bronze Horseman of the Atlantic still stood in the eyes of medieval sailors when they saw the strange sail mast. This, and nothing else, can explain the cowardice of the sailors, who are absolutely sure that "they are dealing with some kind of witchcraft." It is no coincidence that, in order not to be branded as a liar, named Niccoloso, having seen "much more," fear has big eyes! I didn't want to talk about it...

As for the mysterious whistling language of the Guanches of the Canary Islands, the answer to this question is closely connected with the question of the origin of the Guanches themselves, with their subsequent ethnogenesis. Not “aliens from outer space”, who allegedly spoke the whistling “Esperanto of the Universe”, but any of the above-mentioned peoples, whose ancient history and ethnography are practically unknown, could bring the mysterious language of whistling to the Canary Islands:

undersized and dark-skinned pygmies-Africans or "Bushmen" of the Sahara and North-West Africa (especially since this language is ethnographically attested on this ancient continent of the planet - in West Africa, and in ancient times it could be much more widely distributed along the entire coast - all the more that ancient authors pointed to his “timid traces”);

mysterious Guanches, people from North Africa or Europe, whose genealogy is lost for centuries and awakens the fantasy and imagination of scientists;

Mediterranean travelers who accidentally or deliberately ended up in the Canary Islands and founded their settlements in this Atlantic archipelago;

the Berber-Libyans of Northwest Africa, who lived in the neighborhood of the Canary Islands and, apparently, penetrated the islands;

finally, the whistle language could have arisen independently in the Canary Islands, depending on the way of life and economy of the islanders, the lack of more reliable means of communication in conditions of rugged terrain.

Was the whistling language "invented" by the white Cro-Magnon Atlanteans, as the "Atlantomaniacs" believe, and transmitted from one "Atlantic center" to the shores of the Bay of Biscay (to Bearn), the Canary Islands and to North-West and West Africa, and in the New World - to the Indians of Central America? This question could be answered positively if the named whistling languages ​​turned out to be a kind of linguistic phenomena that are not found anywhere else in the world - far from the Atlantic - but ...

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