In the first study of its kind, a Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute-led team of researchers has uncovered the genetics of the ancient Canaanites and a firm link with people living in Lebanon today.

The Bronze Age Canaanites, later known as the Phoenicians, introduced many aspects of society that we know today — they created the first alphabet, established colonies throughout the Mediterranean and were mentioned several times in the Bible.

However, historical records of the Canaanites are limited — they were mentioned in ancient Greek and Egyptian texts, and the Bible which reports widespread destruction of Canaanite settlements and annihilation of the communities.

Experts have long debated who the Canaanites were genetically, what happened to them, who their ancestors were and if they had any descendants today.

In the new study of ancient remains from the Near East, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute scientist Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith and co-authors sequenced the entire genomes of five Canaanite individuals who lived 4,000 years ago in a city known as Sidon in present-day Lebanon.

“Genetic studies using ancient DNA can expand our understanding of history, and answer questions about the likely origins and descendants of enigmatic populations like the Canaanites, who left few written records themselves,” Dr. Tyler-Smith said.

“It was a pleasant surprise to be able to extract and analyse DNA from 4,000-year-old human remains found in a hot environment, which is not known for preserving DNA well,” added Dr. Marc Haber, also from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

The scientists also sequenced the genomes of 99 present-day Lebanese and analyzed the genetic relationship between the ancient Canaanites and modern Lebanese.

They discovered that more than 90% of present-day Lebanese ancestry is likely to be from the Canaanites, with an additional small proportion of ancestry coming from a different Eurasian population.

The team estimates that new Eurasian people mixed with the Canaanite population about 2,200 to 3,800 years ago at a time when there were many conquests of the region from outside.

The analysis of ancient DNA also revealed that the Canaanites themselves were a mixture of local people who settled in farming villages during the Neolithic period and eastern migrants who arrived in the area around 5,000 years ago.

“For the first time we have genetic evidence for substantial continuity in the region, from the Bronze Age Canaanite population through to the present day,” said co-author Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal, Director of the Sidon excavation site in Lebanon.

“These results agree with the continuity seen by archaeologists.”

“Collaborations between archaeologists and geneticists greatly enrich both fields of study and can answer questions about ancestry in ways that experts in neither field can answer alone.”

The findings appear today in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

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Marc Haber et al. Continuity and admixture in the last five millennia of Levantine history from ancient Canaanite and present-day Lebanese genome sequences. American Journal of Human Genetics, published online July 27, 2017; doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.06.013

This article is based on text provided by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.