Phoenicians are a mystery of the ancient world. They gave us the alphabet, built bridges between East and West, but later their civilization seemed to dissolve. Now geneticists have found what archaeologists have failed to find - hereditary combinations of the first seafarers in history are present in the DNA of every 17th man in the Mediterranean region
The first mention of the Phoenicians dates back to 1500 BC, when they were conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III. In the Bible they are known as the "Canaanites", but there is no complete certainty that all the "descendants of Canaan" were Phoenicians, already known from ancient sources.
"Carthage must be destroyed!" - with these words the stern Roman senator Cato the Elder concluded all speeches. The Latins achieved their goal: this is what happened to the Phoenician city, the capital of the state of the same name, in 146 BC.
After the capture of Carthage, the traces of one of the most omnipresent peoples of antiquity, known even during the time of the pharaohs in the XIV century BC, are suddenly lost.
Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and his colleagues decided to find them - using the Y chromosomes (they are passed through the male line).
At first, scholars carefully studied the Bible, as well as Greek and Roman sources, in order to draw up a detailed picture of Phoenician cities and colonies.
After that, DNA samples of the modern population of these places were taken and their detailed analysis was carried out. Additionally, hereditary combinations of representatives of those Mediterranean regions where there were no Punic settlements were studied.
It turned out that one of the Y chromosome variations is present only in the "Phoenician" regions, where it is found in 6% of men. See the American Journal of Human Genetics for details.
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“From the very beginning, we did not know if we would be able to identify genetic markers or not. In fact, we only acted blindly on the basis of historical evidence, but in the end we succeeded,”says Dr. Tyler-Smith.
His optimism is shared by Daniel Platt of IBM's Computational Biology Center: "These are definitely Phoenician footprints."
By the way, as a byproduct of genetic analysis, scientists have found a fairly significant presence in the region of "Greek" markers. This fact was associated with the conquests of Alexander the Great - his army also "stayed" throughout the Mediterranean.