Raymar, MAEF
Ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, and shared more culture than DNA.
Phoenician culture originated in the city-age of the Bronze Age in the uprising and introduced great innovations, including the first alphabet.
In the first millennium AC, this unmistakable people had already created a sea network that stretched to the Iberian Peninsula. But its expansion may not be the one we thought.
Thus suggests a new published in Nature and carried out by the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the archaeoscience of the ancient Mediterranean, co-directed by Johannes Krause.
The objective was to use old DNA to characterize the ancestry of the people Punic and look for genetic connections between them and the Phoenicians Levantinoswith whom they share a culture and a common language.
The team then performed analyzes in 14 phenomenon and public archaeological sites. The results were surprising. “We found surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from the Phoenicians of the Levante to the Punic populations of the Western and Central Mediterranean, ”says the main author Harald Ringbauer to
“This provides a new perspective on how phenicted culture has spread – not through large -scale mass migrations, but through a dynamic process of cultural transmission and assimilation.”
“We observed a genetic profile in the public world that was extraordinarily heterogeneous“, Says David Reich, professor of human evolutionary genetics and biology, who co-lid the study.“ In each place, People were highly variable in their ancestrywith the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary peoples of Sicily and Aegean, and many people with significant descent associated with North Africa as well. ”
In addition, Mediterranean genetic networks suggest that common demographic processes – such as Commerce, Mixed Weddings and Population Mix – played a key role in the formation of these communities.
“These findings reinforce the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, With people moving and mixing through often large geographical distances, ”says researcher Ilan Gronau.
“Studies such as this highlight the power of Ancient DNA in its ability to shed light on the ancestry and mobility of historical populations for which we have relatively scarce direct historical records,” he concludes.
