René Verneau was a French anthropologist who had a special affinity for the Canary Islands and its people. Born in 1852, he took an interest in botany and insects very early in life and later went on to pursue a career in medicine. However, his plans were aborted due to an ongoing war at the time. After the war came to an end, he continued his studies in medicine but diverted to anthropology after taking classes on prehistoric anthropology at the Sorbonne under Ernest-Théodore Hamy and anthropology at the Muséum National d’histoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History) under Armand de Quatrefages.
René Verneau
René’s interest in the Canary Islands kick-started when the Ministry of Public Instruction organized an expedition. They planned to get as many scientific facts from the Archipelago which were rarely known. René’s job was to study the early occupants of the archipelago and determine whether they were related to the Paleolithic Cro-Magnon people, whose fossilized remains had been found in France and other parts of Europe. Paul Broca originally proposed that the Aboriginal people of the Archipelago, also known as the Guanches, were somehow related to the Cro-Magnon people.
René stayed in the Canary Islands for almost 2 years, examining skeletons and studying tombs from the distant past. By the time he returned to Paris, his interest had heightened. Subsequently, he visited the archipelago 6 times.
Historical context
Anthropology before the 20th century was seen and approached as a racist science. The Europeans had the idea that they possessed a superior culture because they somehow evolved better than other races.
The descent of the people of the Canary Islands has been in dispute for centuries now.
The school of thought that everyone went with was created by the French and Germans, and its viewpoint held that any foreign community was culturally inferior to the Western world. Thus, the goal of European scholars was to carry out scientific research that proved the superiority of Western civilization.
The Spanish Civil War brought about a refinement of dictatorship that greatly affected archaeology. At the time, archaeological records were manipulated to suit the socio-political agenda of those in power, and investigations were biased to prove Aryan superiority and the superiority of Iberian cultures using history as a justification.
René Verneau’s opinions: the Guanches
Canary Islands
A pioneer in the field of archeology, René oversaw the first anthropological study of the islands. His belief was based on European ethnocentrism which claimed that island populations that existed before the Spanish conquest were frozen in the Neolithic era and had Cro-Magnon ancestry.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he traveled the islands with his Canarian colleague Gregorio Chil, gathering hundreds of Guanche skulls and studying them.
In the period that followed, René strongly supported the opinion that not all the people of the Archipelago were of one race, which was the opposite of what Chil thought. Shortly after he began exploring the Islands in 1878, he started promoting this claim.
According to Verneau, the Guanches (who were connected to the purported European fossil race) were restricted to only Tenerife, but the Semitic origin of Gran Canaria was more significant.
With this, René openly aimed to stir up controversy. He blamed contemporary writers for the ongoing misunderstanding in Canarian anthropology, as they used the term “Guanches” to refer to every person living in the archipelago.
René Verneau defended racial diversity in the Archipelago by utilizing visual materials as much as possible. His “Rapport sur une mission scientifique dans l’Archipel Cannarien” (1887) contains a number of lithographs that show the frontal views and profiles of skulls from the various Islands (Tenerife, Gran Canaria, and La Palma) along with captions that go with them.
He attempted to visually prove that the closest skull similarities to the Cro-Magnon were restricted to Tenerife, while mixed types that were difficult to assimilate into pure types of the fossil race dominated the other Islands.
Critique
Other arguments were also on the ground as well. The other major question was whether the archipelago still contained the physical and moral characteristics of the previous population. Chil implied that the real Aborigines belonged to the Cro-Magnon race and that the only trustworthy source of information about historical racial facts, osteology, confirms this fact.
Furthermore, the Aboriginal element made up “almost entirely” the current population due to the way the ancestral race had survived. Since it is impossible to completely eradicate the traces of the primitive element that is inherent to race, their customs have also survived.
However, on this matter, Víctor Grau-Bassas agreed with René. He was one of the most notable individuals at the Canarian Museum during the mid-1880s and curator at the time. Four races, in his view, lived on the island of Gran Canaria: Semitic, Berber, Canarian, and an unidentified “small-skulled one.”
But even with the constant inflow of racial waves, remnants of the real ancestral race (the Canarian type) could still be found in isolated areas of the island.
Impact on anthropology: moving forward
The studies of the 19th and 20th centuries caused lithographs of human remains to be distributed throughout Europe and beyond. These ostensibly impartial depictions of race appeared in reputable literature and academic journals.
Furthermore, people were sketched and photographed frequently with the intention of illustrating the continuity between the indigenous people and the present-day occupants of the archipelago. Skulls and mummies are examples of visual representations of the dead that have a sort of dialectic relationship with representations of the living.
Today, backed by the latest excavation material techniques, quite a lot of mind-blowing research is being carried out in archeology and anthropology. We still make use of mummified remains like Verneau did, even though his conclusions have been mostly shunned by the scientific community. Despite this, or perhaps because of his, Verneau’s name will deservedly resound through the ages as a pioneer in the anthropology of the Canary Islands.
References
Goodrum, M. (2022, July 31). René Verneau (1852-1938). Pressbooks. Retrieved December 18, 2023, from https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/paleoanthropology/chapter/__unknown__/
Sierra, L. G., & Gómez, M. J. B. (2023, May 11). The Canary Museum: From Transnational Trade of Human Remains to the Visual Representations of Race (1879-1900). Culture & History Digital Journal. Retrieved December 19, 2023, from https://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2023.006
Mitchell, P. (2023, May 15). Archaeological Research in the Canary Islands: Island Archaeology off Africa’s Atlantic Coast. Journal of Archaeological Research. Retrieved December 19, 2023, from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-023-09186-
