Canary Islands: Oddities and Coincidences?

You don't usually think of the Canary Islands and go "that place had some freaky shit!" But, it would appear that it did!  

**Read this entire post - you do not want to miss one of these freaky things because by the end of this reading, you will be utterly amazed!**

First, there is the case of hypertrichosis.  There is a form of hypertrichosis referred to as "Wolf Man Syndrome" that was found to genetically originate in one family in the Canary Islands in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are when the Spanish arrived and took over, wanting to mate with the local females who were tall and blond and red-headed. The Spanish being the same ones who later settled into Mexico and South American where other cases of the disorder ran through the bloodlines.  It would appear there was an isolated race of people on the islands who carried a gene that could make one hair covered head to toe and anyone who mated into that bloodline could be a potential carrier of the gene.

Julia Pastor Lorna worked for the circus. Her mother never elaborated on who her father was. She had irregular double rows of teeth, jutting and prominent mouth because of the crowding, sloping forehead, strong brow ridge, and hair covered body.  She was distantly related to the Canary Islands tribe who introduced this gene to the Spanish population.

"The genetics thus suggests the native men were sharply reduced in numbers due to the war, large numbers of Spaniard men stayed in the islands and married the local women, the Canarians adopted Spanish names, language, and religion, and in this way, the Canarians were Hispanicized."

Weird, huh? Oh, it doesn't end there at all!

The original occupants of the Canary Islands were a native people called the Guanche.  Their mummies have been found with red hair and blond hair. Reportedly, the men were around 7 feet and the women around 6 feet. Kind of odd, hmm? 


Here (below) is a statue of Bencomo the "king" figure for the Guanches who helped start the rebellion when the Castilians landed.  Impressive isn't he?

Their mummies were wrapped in skins and hidden in caves. In fact, some very inaccessible vertical caves are believed to hold more of them yet undiscovered.  Their skulls were described as dolichocephalic (a delightful term you will find when researchers want to say "long skulls" so the rest of us don't get it) It means basically "the skull is longer than it should be relative to width." Nowadays, this condition is found often in people who have Marfan syndrome, along with unusual height.

This source described them well; "Generally dolichocephalic, fair-featured with blond or red-hair, with males over six foot tall and women approaching six feet in height, they were a people of tall, strong and comely appearance, resembling many Northern Europeans today but for a generally greater and more robust stature. Their general appearance and racial characteristic were valued by the Spanish: "All historians agree in reporting that the Canarians were beautiful. They were tall, well built and of singular proportion. They were also robust and courageous with high mental capacity. Women were very beautiful and Spanish Gentlemen often used to take their wives among the population."

What is rather odd is that it's believed they migrated to the islands around 1000 BC. Most scientists assume they were Berber people (indigenous to North Africa and the Nile area). That would be fine, except it doesn't explain how in about 5000 years they became tall people with blond and red hair in their isolation. It may be possible that these people bleached the coloring from the hair in some kind of fashion or ritual. It still does not explain their unusual height, though King Tut (also of Berber descent) had a dolichocephalic head.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would stick to an earlier theory I tossed out - that aliens, wanting to tweak our genetic pool, did it the old-fashioned way long ago - introduced to our population, attractive beings we would want to breed with so that we get certain physical attributes, whether it was height, strength, immunity, intelligence, whatever that factor might have been. That would explain these giant blond and red haired people all over the world in a time we did not see them circumventing the globe feasibly, and having unique enough looking to be considered desirable because they were fair and different.

The only other possibility is that there was a culture of very strong, smart people who knew how to travel the globe and as they went along the way, some of them said "I've had enough, I'm staying here" and remained and bred with the population and others moved on to other lands.

One last possibility is that man used to have many colors of hair readily and after breeding in communities, they began to create dominant hair colors that took over groups, like dark hair in Asians and such. 

Any way you look at it, the Canary Islands seem to hold a great deal of answers to some very unusual mysteries.  Take for instance the very real threat that when their massive volcano goes, a huge chunk of land will slide to the ocean floor, creating a tsunami that will basically obliterate the UK and the eastern seaboard of the United States. This almost sounds like how Atlantis went bye bye, huh? 

But wait! I'm still not done with the weirdness. Anyone who researches Bigfoot might enjoy this - the people of the Canary Islands utilized a whistled language:  "Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message. English speakers experience something similar when they listen to sine-wave speech.  Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study."





Oh, no, I'm not done with you yet!

Any Bigfoot researcher might also appreciate this - The Tibicenas! 

"Tibicenas were imagined to be demons or genies who had the bodies of great wild dogs with red eyes, covered by long, black fur. They lived in deep caves inside the mountains.  Some existing caves today are still referred to as Tibicena lairs, such as "Cueva del Tibicena". According to myth, Tibicenas attacked livestock and persons, particularly at night. Guanche mythology posited Tibicenas as offspring of Guayota, (the devil or malignant deity). Inhabitants of Tenerife (where they were called Guacanchas) and Gran Canaria (where they were called Tibicenas) shared a belief in them. Both names refer to the same mythical being."

I suspect if I poked around longer, I might find even more, but isn't it quite odd and interesting that this set of innocuous islands could create so many oddities that ring true for serious cryptic mysteries around the world!