Okay, my old man recently came back from a vacation in the Canary Islands. He said that while on some geriatri-tour he was informed that when the Canaries were first “discovered,” the indigenous peoples were described as blonde-haired, blue-eyed people who kept dogs as pets.
I’m rather skeptical of this “fact”, but this time I thought someone might like to blow this one straight out of the water, rather than going and finding out for myself.
Sorry, I don’t feel like looking it up, either.
But as everyone now knows, the Canaries were named after the dogs that lived there, so the dog part may hold water. However, IIRC, the namesake dogs were wild, not pets.
BTW: “geriatri-tour”. Hee hee.
The native inhabitants of the canaries when they were discovered and colonized by Spain were called guanches and I was not around at the time to tell you what they looked like but if you do a search for guanche or guanches you will get one hundred thousand hits and you may find out.
Wow! I know the Canaries are only a stone’s throw from Morocco, but heck if that doesn’t make for an interesting spin on prehistoric exploration. Thanks, Tom. I thought someone like you might like taking a peep at that one.