|
Discover-2/11/2008|The Phoenician culture vanished
from the Mediterranean following the fall of Carthage in 146
BC, when the Romans razed the city and (according to legend)
salted the earth, but the Phoenician people didn’t fade
away. A new
genetic analysis shows that 1 in 17 men in the
Mediterranean region have Phoenician DNA, and must be
descended from those ancient seafarers.
The findings could fill a gap in the
history of the Phoenician civilization, which originated two
to three thousand years ago in the eastern Mediterranean—in
what is now Lebanon and Syria—and included prominent
traders, according to Chris Tyler-Smith, lead author…. “By
the time of the Romans they more or less disappeared from
history, and little has been known about them since” [National
Geographic News].
For the study,
published in the
American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers
used
archaeological evidence and written accounts from the
Greek and Romans to determine where the Phoenicians settled,
and then took DNA samples from 1,330 men living in areas
that were once Phoenician trading centers, including Syria,
Tunisia, Morocco, Cyprus, Malta, and the West Bank. “When we
started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the
Phoenicians. All we had to guide us was history: We knew
where they had and hadn’t settled. But this simple
information turned out to be enough, with the help of modern
genetics, to trace a vanished people,” Tyler-Smith said .
The researchers examined genes on the
men’s Y chromosome which is passed down from father to son,
and compared them to the genes of other men from areas that
had no link to Phoenician settlements. From the research
emerged a distinctive Phoenician genetic signature, in
contrast to genetic traces spread by other migrations, like
those of late Stone-Age farmers, Greek colonists and the
Jewish Diaspora. The scientists thus concluded that, for
example, one boy in each school class from Cyprus to Tunis
may be a descendant of Phoenician traders
|
