New study sheds light on the history of human migration

Oct 31, 2008 09:09 GMT  ·  By

Six percent of the population in the Mediterranean communities descends from the ancient civilization of Phoenicians, according to a new study. During the third Punic War (149-146 BC), the Phoenician capital of Carthage (meaning “The New City”), was destroyed by the Romans, and a massive systematic execution process ensued. The people whose lives were spared were sold as slaves. This greatly influenced the spreading of the Phoenician people through the ages.

 

Their native place was the contemporary Lebanon, while Carthage once stood on the place of today's Tunis. Their civilization in North Africa (or Canaan – and later in Spain and nearby regions) was among the most powerful of the time in terms of culture, trade and navy, and they defeated the Romans many times. The color most favored by their civilization was purple, and they were the first state to adopt the wide usage of an alphabet, one that is also the ancestor of all the modern alphabets.

 

Chris Tyler-Smith from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and a team of researchers of the Genographic Research Project relied on Bible texts and references from ancient Roman and Greek writers in order to determine where the ancient Phoenician people resided. Starting from that, they compared the genetic material from the residents of the respective sites with that of people who lived in places not related to Phoenician settlements. The scientists discovered that the male-only Y chromosome contained a genetic marker specific to the descendants of the Phoenician people.

 

Six percent of the region's population, meaning one every seventeen people from the Mediterranean communities was found to be a Phoenician descendant. “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,” stated Tyler-Smith.

 

During their human migration history study funded by National Geographic and IBM's Genographic Project, they have also come across similar spreading results for descendants of the ancient Greeks. Future studies of this type could trace the genetic impact of the army of Alexander the Great army in Asia and India, as well as the genetic spreading determined by the Mongols' European invasion, or the expansion of the Viking people.