https://bookofmormonevidence.org/dna-discovery-identifies-living-descendants-of-biblical-canaanites/
Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences
The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture that became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unclear. In this study, we sequenced five whole genomes from ∼3,700-year-old individuals from the city of Sidon, a major Canaanite city-state on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. We also sequenced the genomes of 99 individuals from present-day Lebanon to catalog modern Levantine genetic diversity. We find that a Bronze Age Canaanite-related ancestry was widespread in the region, shared among urban populations inhabiting the coast (Sidon) and inland populations (Jordan) who likely lived in farming societies or were pastoral nomads. This Canaanite-related ancestry derived from mixture between local Neolithic populations and eastern migrants genetically related to Chalcolithic Iranians. We estimate, using linkage-disequilibrium decay patterns, that admixture occurred 6,600–3,550 years ago, coinciding with recorded massive population movements in Mesopotamia during the mid-Holocene. We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age. In addition, we find Eurasian ancestry in the Lebanese not present in Bronze Age or earlier Levantines. We estimate that this Eurasian ancestry arrived in the Levant around 3,750–2,170 years ago during a period of successive conquests by distant populations.
Main Text
The Near East, including the Levant, has been central to human prehistory and history from the expansion out of Africa 50–60 thousand years ago (kya),1 through post-glacial expansions2 and the Neolithic transition 10 kya, to the historical period when Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, and many others left their impact on the region.3 Aspects of the genetic history of the Levant have been inferred from present-day DNA,4,5 but the more comprehensive analyses performed in Europe6–11 have shown the limitations of relying on present-day information alone and highlighted the power of ancient DNA (aDNA) for addressing questions about population histories.12 Unfortunately, although the few aDNA results from the Levant available so far are sufficient to reveal how much its history differs from that of Europe,13 more work is needed to establish a thorough understanding of Levantine genetic history. Such work is hindered by the hot and sometimes wet environment,12,13 but improved aDNA technologies including use of the petrous bone as a source of DNA14 and the rich archaeological remains available encouraged us to further explore the potential of aDNA in this region. Here, we present genome sequences from five Bronze Age Lebanese samples and show how they improve our understanding of the Levant’s history over the last five millennia.
During the Bronze Age in the Levant, around 3–4 kya, a distinctive culture emerged as a Semitic-speaking people known as the Canaanites. The Canaanites inhabited an area bounded by Anatolia to the north, Mesopotamia to the east, and Egypt to the south, with access to Cyprus and the Aegean through the Mediterranean. Thus the Canaanites were at the center of emerging Bronze Age civilizations and became politically and culturally influential.15 They were later known to the ancient Greeks as the Phoenicians who, 2.3–3.5 kya, colonized territories throughout the Mediterranean reaching as far as the Iberian Peninsula.16 However, for uncertain reasons but perhaps related to the use of papyrus instead of clay for documentation, few textual records have survived from the Canaanites themselves and most of their history known today has been reconstructed from ancient Egyptian and Greek records, the Hebrew Bible, and archaeological excavations.15 Many uncertainties still surround the origin of the Canaanites. Ancient Greek historians believed their homeland was located in the region of the Persian Gulf,16,17 but modern researchers tend to reject this hypothesis because of archaeological and historical evidence of population continuity through successive millennia in the Levant. The Canaanite culture is alternatively thought to have developed from local Chalcolithic people who were themselves derived from people who settled in farming villages 9–10 kya during the Neolithic period.15 Uncertainties also surround the fate of the Canaanites: the Bible reports the destruction of the Canaanite cities and the annihilation of its people; if true, the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations. However, no archaeological evidence has so far been found to support widespread destruction of Canaanite cities between the Bronze and Iron Ages: cities on the Levant coast such as Sidon and Tyre show continuity of occupation until the present day.
aDNA research has the potential to resolve many questions related to the history of the Canaanites, including their place of origin and fate. Here, we sampled the petrous portion of temporal bones belonging to five ancient individuals dated to between 3,750 and 3,650 years ago (ya) from Sidon, which was a major Canaanite city-state during this period (Figures S1 and S2). We extracted DNA and built double-stranded libraries according to published protocols without uracil-DNA glycosylase treatment.18–21 We sequenced the libraries on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 using 2× 75 bp reads and processed the sequences using the PALEOMIX pipeline.22 We retained reads ≥30 bp and collapsed pairs with minimum overlap of 15 bp, allowing a mismatch rate of 0.06 between the pairs. We mapped the merged sequences to the hs37d5 reference sequence, removed duplicates, removed two bases from the ends of each read, and randomly sampled a single sequence with a minimum quality of ≥20 to represent each SNP. We obtained a genomic coverage of 0.4–2.3× and a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome coverage of 53–164× (Table 1). Y chromosome genotypes were jointly called across males from the 1000 Genomes Project, present-day Lebanese, and two identified Canaanite males using FreeBayes v.0.9.18.23 A maximum likelihood phylogeny was inferred using RAxML v.8.2.1024 and visualized using iTOL v.3.5.3.25 In order to assess ancient DNA authenticity, we estimated mtDNA and X chromosome contamination26–28 (Table S1) and restricted some analyses to sequences with aDNA damage patterns29,30 (Figures S3 and S4), demonstrating that the sequence data we present are endogenous and minimally contaminated.
