The heirs of the legendary biblical Canaan, "the promised land", are the modern inhabitants of Lebanon, according to an article published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“We found out that the Canaanites were a cross between local farmers who had lived in the Middle East since the Neolithic era and migrants from the East who arrived in the region about five thousand years ago. Modern Lebanese are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, with the exception of a small portion of their genome contributed by Assyrians, Persians or Macedonians,”says Marc Haber of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK.
Canaan is a collective biblical name for countries in the western part of the Middle East, and is believed to include ancient Phenicia, the Hittite states, the Amorites, and many independent city states. According to the Bible, the territory of Canaan was the “promised land” which Yahweh promised to the Jews who had escaped from slavery in Egypt.
Its territory, both in the Bible and in reality, was gradually conquered by the Jewish kings in the second half of the second millennium BC. They managed to subjugate almost all the small states of the region, except for the powerful city-states of Phenicia, Tire, Sidon and Byblos in the north of Canaan.
Scientists know practically nothing about the culture and origin of the Canaanites, since written evidence of their migrations has not yet been found. Unfired clay tablets of the Phoenicians have survived to this day in a much worse condition than the papyri of the Egyptians, and therefore, apart from their alphabet, the basics of religion and some information about the political system, we know almost nothing about the life of the inhabitants of Canaan.
Mark Haber and his colleagues uncovered the origin story of these mysterious biblical peoples who “worshiped Baal and Moloch,” and found their descendants on modern Earth. Scientists have restored and studied the genomes of five people who were buried in the territory of Sidon - one of the largest ports and trade centers of Phenicia and the entire ancient world - about 3.7 thousand years ago.
Human bones retain their DNA extremely poorly in a hot and humid tropical climate, but in this case, scientists were lucky and they managed to recover the complete DNA of the ancient Sidonians. After reading it about twice, geneticists obtained a very accurate virtual copy of their mitochondrial DNA, which is necessary for the search for the roots and descendants of the Canaanites.
As Haber notes, this was possible due to the fact that the DNA was preserved in the densest part of the bones of the skull, from where the water did not have time to wash it, and the soil bacteria could not completely decompose it.
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Scientists have compared these fragments of ancient DNA with samples of the genomes of modern peoples of the Middle East, Caucasus, Europe and Iran, where the ancestors of the Canaans supposedly lived, as well as with other "resurrected" samples of the genetic material of the ancient inhabitants of the Earth.
It turned out that both modern theories about the origin of the Canaanites, and the ancient Greek chronicles describing the history of this people in a completely different way, were not entirely correct. On the one hand, the ancestors of the ancient inhabitants of Canaan, according to modern scholars, really lived permanently in the Middle East since the Neolithic and were not migrants like many other peoples.
On the other hand, about five thousand years ago, the so far unknown tribes from Iran penetrated into the region, mixed with the local population. This partly confirms the theory of the ancient Greeks, who considered the Canaanites to be relatives of the Persians and other peoples of the Persian Gulf.
The Canaanites were not completely exterminated, as the Bible suggests - their direct descendants are the modern inhabitants of Lebanon. From a genetic point of view, they are not "pure" Canaanites, since about three thousand years ago they mixed with alien peoples from the north and east of Asia, from which modern Lebanese inherited about 10-15% of their genome.
The discovery of the roots of the Canaanites, scientists hope, will help archaeologists and historians "grope" for other traces of this little-studied biblical people, and reveal details of their history, culture and social life that are still unknown to us.