A death mask from the third or second century bc found in the Phoenician trading city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia.Credit: Peter Horree/Alamy
An ancient Middle Eastern civilization that developed an early alphabet spread its culture far and wide — but not its DNA, finds a 23 April Nature study1 of hundreds of ancient human genomes.
Phoenician civilization emerged more than 3,000 years ago, centred around what is now Lebanon, before expanding across the Mediterranean Sea. Middle Eastern Phoenician city-states eventually fell to other groups, but the culture thrived farther west — most notably in Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, until its destruction in 146 bc.
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Phoenician city-states shared languages — recorded with an alphabet that was a precursor to Greek and Latin letters — religious practices and maritime trading economies. Many researchers have presumed that their inhabitants also shared ancestries connected to the culture’s Middle Eastern origins.
To study this history, population geneticist Harald Ringbauer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues analysed the DNA from the remains of around 200 people from Phoenician archaeological sites in the Middle East, Europe and North Africa.
Ancestry puzzle
To Ringbauer’s surprise, people from Mediterranean outposts of Phoenician culture — also known as Punic people — shared no ancestry with ancient Middle Easterners, even those from sites linked to Phoenicians and their forebears the Canaanites.
But neither did Punic people’s genomes always resemble those of people from other local populations, such as those in Sardinia and Ibiza. Instead, Punic people shared an ancestry profile resembling those of ancient inhabitants of Greece and Sicily. Over time, North African ancestry entered the mix — reflecting the rise of Carthage after 500 bc.
