Study offers key to mystery of ancient Canaanites
The Bible claimed God ordered the Canaanites to be wiped out, but a new genetic research study suggests the ancient people survived that initial order.
In later excerpts of Judges and Ezra, there is evidence that not all Canaanites were destroyed by the Israelites — some fled or became servants. Over the years, little information had been discovered about the Canaanites — until a new genetic research study found their DNA, confirming they did survive.
The Canaanites’ DNA lives on in Lebanon, where more than 90% of Lebanese derive their ancestry from Canaanites, according to a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“We know about ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, but we know very little about the ancient Canaanites because their records didn’t survive,” lead author Marc Haber told The New York Times.
The history of the Canaanite people has been a mystery, geneticist Chris Tyler-Smith told The Washington Post.
“We haven’t found any of their writings,” Smith said. “We don’t have direct information from them. In that sense, they are a mystery.”
The Canaanites once roamed in the Near East region and beyond, mostly known as modernday parts of Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
To learn more about the Canaanites, researchers retrieved DNA from ancient skeletons found at the Sidon excavation site in Lebanon. Out of the two dozen bones investigated for genetic material, only five contained ancient DNA. The DNA was compared with a database containing genetic information from hundreds of human populations. Results were further compared with the genomes of nearly 100 of modern-day Lebanese people, showing about 93% of them shared DNA with the samples from the Bronze Age.
“What we see is that since the Bronze Age, this ancestry, or the genetics of the people there, didn’t change much,” Haber said. “It changed a little, but it didn’t change much, and that is what surprised me.”