Amazing stuff!
"Scholars have long assumed the Phoenicians—famed for their maritime prowess and the invention of an alphabet ... descended from the Canaanites mentioned in the Bible. But a study of hundreds of ancient genomes finds that, although Phoenician culture and language may have originated in the land of Canaan, most Phoenician people did not.
Phoenician culture began to spread westward across the Mediterranean beginning around 1000 B.C.E. From Sicily to Spain and across North Africa, new coastal towns were built in the Phoenician style, with Phoenician artifacts and agricultural practices in evidence. ...
To find out more, geneticists worked with archaeologists in Europe and North Africa to analyze more than 200 skeletons excavated from Phoenician-style graves. In a twist, the skeletons’ DNA shows that most of them lacked Levantine ancestry, drawing from a mix of Mediterranean populations instead. The finding supports the idea that whenever small groups of Phoenician settlers founded colonies, locals eagerly joined them and adopted their way of life.
The study also affirms that Phoenicians traveled widely. In every cemetery the researchers looked at, none of the men shared similar Y chromosomes, suggesting that Phoenician men didn’t stay in one place for multiple generations. The team even found two second cousins who lived a sea apart, with one buried in Sicily and the other in North Africa. “This was a culture that was constantly integrating people,” ..."
From the abstract:
"The maritime Phoenician civilization from the Levant transformed the entire Mediterranean during the first millennium bce However, the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician–Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean has been unclear in the absence of comprehensive ancient DNA studies.
Here, we generated genome-wide data for 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza, and an early Iron Age individual from Algeria. Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links.
Instead, these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all of the sampled sites, including in Carthage itself.
Different Punic sites across the central and western Mediterranean show similar patterns of high genetic diversity. We also detect genetic relationships across the Mediterranean, reflecting shared demographic processes that shaped the Punic world."
Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors (no public access)
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