Canary islands-north African population affinities: measures of divergence based on dental morphology.
This investigation addresses two related questions about the origins and biological affinities of the Canary Islands' aboriginal inhabitants. First: With which North African populations do the pre-conquest inhabitants of the Canary Islands have their greatest affinities? Second: Does inter-island biological variability among the Canary Islanders, as has been suggested by other researchers (Hooton 1925, Schwidetzky 1963), imply that potentially different founding populations remained distinct during the pre-conquest period? This study employs dental morphology data derived from pre-conquest skeletons to answer these questions. Non-metric dental traits appear to be controlled by polygenic systems with a low to moderate environmental contribution to the resulting phenotype (Berry 1978, Harris & Bailit 1980, Nichol 1990) and can thus be assumed to reflect genetic relationships. The dental morphology of a sample of Canary Islanders (n = 397) is compared to that of Northwest African samples of Algerian Shawia Berbers (n = 26), Kabyle Berbers (n = 32), Bedouin Arabs (n = 49) and Punic Carthaginians (n = 28) as well as to six samples from Northeast Africa (n = 307) included for the purpose of understanding Canary Islanders' affinities within a wider context. The analysis employs 28 dental traits, quantifying differences in their expression among the various samples through a summary statistic, CAB Smith's Mean Measure of Divergence (MMD). The MMD analysis indicates that the Canary Island sample is most similar to the four samples from Northwest Africa: the Shawia Berbers, Kabyle Berbers, Bedouin Arabs and Carthaginians, less similar to the three Egyptian samples and least like the three Nubian samples. An intra-island comparison among samples from La Gomera, Gran Canaria and Tenerife reveals low, insignificant MMD values in all cases, implying that inter-island dental morphology differences are not so great as to require hypotheses of separate founding populations.
Guatelli-Steinberg
D
D
Ohio State University, Newark, OH, USA. guatelli-steinbe.1@osu.edu
Irish
J D
JD
Lukacs
J R
JR
D000328:Adult; D000349:Africa / Q000208:ethnology; D000885:Anthropology, Physical / Q000379:methods; D000886:Anthropometry; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005006:Ethnicity; D005260:Female; D005828:Genetics, Population; D005843:Geography; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D044469:Racial Groups; D013030:Spain / Q000208:ethnology; D014070:Tooth / Q000033:anatomy & histology*