No one knows who the first Canary Islanders were. Juba II of Mauretania, a Roman-allied North African king and son-in-law to the famous Cleopatra, sent an expedition to the Atlantic islands, which found no people but mysterious ruins and a profusion of dogs, after whose Latin name, canis, the islands were named. (Canary birds were then named after the islands.) Archaeological finds of Roman-made goods tell us that a permanent population had either been missed by Juba’s men or established itself at some subsequent point in Roman times. Genetic and linguistic evidence indicates that these people, generally known as Guanches, came from the nearby coast of Africa in what is now Morocco and Western Sahara.