Friday, June 17, 2016

DNA from Ancient Phoenician Stuns Scientists

 

 

As should be obvious from my work, seamanship was dominated through the European Bronze Age by Atlanteans who were surely closely affiliated with Iberian populations at the least.  Thus it is a matter of collecting evidence to support all that.  In short though, all these port cities were founded by the Atlanteans or whatever peoples took up sea trade.  Calling them Sea Peoples is quite correct

Where we fail ourselves is understanding that we had a fifteen hundred year global history of trade and growth of all these related peoples all dominated by European populations ending in 1159BC.  That was then followed by the the successor sea peoples who were the same folks but seriously diminished by the demand collapse of their trade currency of copper axes.  These were known as the Phoenicians and they succumbed to the emergence of the Greeks or at least fell back on their cities to be then overrun by the Romans in time.

I have ample reason to suspect that the Nile delta was a largely Atlantean colony during the Bronze Age.  Again DNA will ultimately sort all that out to our satisfaction.


DNA from ancient Phoenician stuns scientists


A wax figure of "The Young Phoenician Man of Carthage" is seen during the opening of a special exhibition at the American University of Beirut (AUB) Archaeological Museum in Beirut January 29, 2014. (REUTERS/Jamal Saidi) 
A study of the first DNA obtained from an ancient Phoenician reveals that the man had European ancestry.

The research team, which was co-led by Professor Lisa Matisoo-Smith of the University of Otago in New Zealand, sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of 2,500-year-old Phoenician buried in North Africa. Experts studied a man dubbed the “Young Man of Byrsa” or “Ariche,” whose remains were taken from a sarcophagus in the ancient city of Carthage, just outside Tunis, the Tunisian capital. Carthage was the center of the Phoenician civilization.

Analysis shows that the man belonged to a rare European haplogroup – a genetic group with a common ancestor – indicating that his maternal ancestry is linked to locations on the North Mediterranean coast, probably on the Iberian Peninsula.

The findings offer the earliest evidence of the European mitochondrial haplogroup U5b2c1 in North Africa, according to Matisoo-Smith, dating its arrival to at least the late sixth century B.C.

"U5b2c1 is considered to be one of the most ancient haplogroups in Europe and is associated with hunter-gatherer populations there,” she explained, in a press release. “It is remarkably rare in modern populations today, found in Europe at levels of less than one per cent. Interestingly, our analysis showed that Ariche's mitochondrial genetic make-up most closely matches that of the sequence of a particular modern day individual from Portugal.”

Researchers note that, while the Phoenicians are thought to have originated from the area that is now Lebanon, their influence spread across the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish cities of Malaga and Cadiz, for example, were founded by Phoenicians.

Experts analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of 47 modern Lebanese people and found none were of the U5b2c1 lineage. U5b2c1 has already been found in two ancient hunter-gatherers recovered from an archaeological site north-Western spain, according to Matisoo-Smith.

"While a wave of farming peoples from the Near East replaced these hunter-gatherers, some of their lineages may have persisted longer in the far south of the Iberian peninsula and on off-shore islands and were then transported to the melting pot of Carthage in North Africa via Phoenician and Punic trade networks," she said, in the press release.

The study was published in the journal Plos One.

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