Analysis of ancient DNA reveals that the Biblical account isn’t the whole story.
The Bible mentions the Canaanites, a people of the Ancient Near East, several times. Archaeologists use the word to describe a group of settlers and pastoral nomads living among the southern Levant -- in present day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan -- during the late 2nd millennium BC.
But exactly who they were, where they came from and what happened to them remain open questions.
The Canaanites are famous as the bad guys of the Book of Joshua in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. First, God orders the Hebrews to destroy the Canaanites along with several other groups, and later we hear that the Canaanites have actually been wiped out. Among archaeologists, however, the Canaanites are a cultural group whose rise and fall has remained a mystery. Now, a group of archaeologists and geneticists has discovered strong evidence that the Canaanites were not wiped out.
They are, in fact, the ancestors of modern Lebanese people. The Canaanites were a people who lived three to four thousand years ago off the coast of the Mediterranean, and their cities were spread across an area known today as Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. Though they were one of the first civilizations in the area to use writing, they wrote most of their documents on papyrus leaves that didn't survive. As a result, our only information about these people has come from their rivals and enemies, like the Hebrews, whose accounts were likely biased.
Those questions may soon have answers, however, thanks to new DNA analysis.
For the first time, scientists have sequenced ancient Canaanite genomes after sequencing DNA material recovered from five Canaanite individuals who lived some 4,000 years in present day Lebanon.
Researchers also sequenced the genomes of 99 modern Lebanese people, allowing scientists to establish relationships among modern and ancient residents of the region. They share the results of their analysis this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
"We found that the Canaanites were a mixture of local people who settled in farming villages during the Neolithic period and eastern migrants who arrived in the region about 5,000 years ago," Marc Haber, researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, said in a news release. "The present-day Lebanese are likely to be direct descendants of the Canaanites, but they have in addition a small proportion of Eurasian ancestry that may have arrived via conquests by distant populations such as the Assyrians, Persians, or Macedonians."
During the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, conquest-driven genetic mixing was common. And indeed, the Canaanites received an influx for new genes from Eurasian people between 3,800 to 2,200 years. Despite this, the Canaanites and their descendants remained rather genetically distinct.
"In light of the enormously complex history of this region in the last few millennia, it was quite surprising that over 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of present-day Lebanese was derived from the Canaanites," researcher Chris Tyler-Smith said.
Both the genetic and archaeological records suggest the Canaanites have enjoyed cultural and genetic continuity since the Bronze Age.
"For the first time we have genetic evidence for substantial continuity in the region, from the Bronze Age Canaanite population through to the present day," lead excavator Claude Doumet-Serhal said. "These results agree with the continuity seen by archaeologists."