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Fate of Ancient Canaanites Seen in DNA Analysis: They Survived
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God’s call for the annihilation of the Canaanites, a people who lived in what are now Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories …
The Bronze Age Canaanites
lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago in the region now encompassed
by Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Despite being the first group …
the Canaanites were not wiped out. Instead, the group survived, and are the ancestors of the people now living in modern-day Lebanon. The findings highlight the value of …
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God’s call for the annihilation of the Canaanites, a people who lived in what are now Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories thousands of years ago.
“You shall not leave alive anything that breathes,” God said in the passage. “But you shall utterly destroy them.”
But
a genetic analysis published on Thursday has found that the ancient
population survived that divine call for their extinction, and their
descendants live in modern Lebanon.
“We
can see the present-day Lebanese can trace most of their ancestry to
the Canaanites or a genetically equivalent population,” said Chris Tyler-Smith,
a geneticist with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute who is an author
of the paper. “They derive just over 90 percent of their ancestry from
the Canaanites.”
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Dr.
Tyler-Smith and an international team of geneticists and archaeologists
recovered ancient DNA from bones belonging to five Canaanites retrieved
from an excavation site in Sidon, Lebanon, that were 3,650 to 3,750
years old. The team then compared the ancient DNA with the genomes of 99
living people from Lebanon that the group had sequenced. It found that
the modern Lebanese people shared about 93 percent of their ancestry
with the Bronze Age Sidon samples.
The team published its results in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
“The conclusion is clear,” said Iosif Lazaridis,
a geneticist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “Based on
this study it turns out that people who lived in Lebanon almost 4,000
years ago were quite similar to people who lived there today, to the
modern Lebanese.”
Marc Haber,
a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England
and lead author on the study, said that compared with other Bronze Age
civilizations, not much is known about the Canaanites.
“We
know about ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, but we know very
little about the ancient Canaanites because their records didn’t
survive,” he said. Their writings may have been kept on papyrus, which
did not stand the test of time as clay did. What is known about the
Canaanites is that they lived and traded along the eastern coast of the
present-day Mediterranean, a region that was known as the Levant.
“What
we see is that since the Bronze Age, this ancestry, or the genetics of
the people there, didn’t change much,” Dr. Haber said. “It changed a
little, but it didn’t change much and that is what surprised me.”
At
first the team was not sure if it would be able to retrieve DNA from
the ancient skeletons, which were recovered from the hot and humid
excavation site within the last 19 years. Dr. Haber had chosen more than
two dozen bones from the site that looked promising and had them
investigated for genetic material. It turned out that only five
contained ancient DNA. All of those came from the petrous part of the
temporal bone, which is the tough part of the skull behind the ear, from
five different individuals.
After
extracting that DNA, the team members compared it with a database that
contained genetic information from hundreds of human populations. They
then further compared their results with the genomes of the modern-day
Lebanese population sample, which revealed what happened to the ancient
Canaanite population.
“Genetics has the power to answer questions that historical records or archaeology are not able to answer,” Dr. Haber said.
He
said researchers thought that migrations, conquests and the intermixing
of Eurasian people — like the Assyrians, Persians or Macedonians — with
the Canaanites 3,800 to 2,200 years ago might have contributed to the
slight genetic changes seen in modern Lebanese populations. Still, the
Lebanese retain most of their ancestral DNA from the Canaanites.
“It
confirms the continuity of occupation and rooted tradition we have seen
on-site, which was occupied from the 4th millennium B.C. right to the
Crusader period,” Claude Doumet-Serhal, an archaeologist and director of the Sidon Excavation who is a co-author on the paper, said in an email.
She
said that the archaeologists had found about 160 burials to date at
their excavation site, which is in the heart of modern Sidon. They
include graves and burials where a person was placed in a large jar, and
they date to between 1900 and 1550 B.C. The genetic results further
support the archaeological findings.
“We
were delighted by the findings,” Dr. Doumet-Serhal said. “We are
looking at the Canaanite society through 160 burials and at the same
time uncovering a common past for all the people of Lebanon, whatever
religion they belong to.”
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