Spoiler Alert on the Canaanites: They Weren't Wiped Out

Archaeologists, however, identify the Canaanites as a collection of tribes of varying ethnicities that appears in the Levant around the beginning of the second millennia B.C. Over the centuries, they were at various times independent city-states or client states under Egyptian control, and their presence is recorded in letters from Bronze Age rulers in Egypt, Anatolia, Babylon, and elsewhere in the region.

They wrote that the Bible reported the destruction of the Canaanite cities and the annihilation of its population, and if that were true, the Canaanites could not have contributed genetically to any modern populations.

The Bible suggests the Canaanites were wiped out by the ancient Israelites, but a new study says otherwise, claiming the people survived and went on to be the ancestors of those who today live in Lebanon, ScienceDaily reports. Numerous ancient samples tested came from sand-filled vessels near the sea shore at Sidon, a major Canaanite/Phoenician city-state that was eventually conquered by Alexander the Great in 332. The timeline supports theories that suggest the appearance of the Canaanites is linked with the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, some 4,200 years ago. Their writings may have been kept on papyrus, which did not stand the test of time as clay did.

The remaining 10 percent, it seems, came from even more migrants who settled the land between 1800 and 200 BCE, around the time of culture shift that saw the Bronze Age Canaanites give way to the Iron Age Phoenicians. "It changed a little, but it didn't change much and that is what surprised me". The skeletons dated from between 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. Dr. Haber had chosen more than two dozen bones from the site that looked promising and had them investigated for genetic material. Perhaps there was a Biblical war that ancient DNA simply can not see. All of those came from the petrous part of the temporal bone, which is the tough part of the skull behind the ear, from five different individuals.

The new study is notable for its sequencing of the Canaanite genome.

Fate of Ancient Canaanites Seen in DNA Analysis: They Survived

After extracting that DNA, the team members compared it with a database that contained genetic information from hundreds of human populations.

Dr Marc Haber, of The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: "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". He compared their genomes to those of 99 living Lebanese people and hundreds of others in genetic databases.

"Genetics has the power to answer questions that historical records or archaeology are not able to answer", Dr. Haber said.

"It confirms the continuity of occupation and rooted tradition we have seen on-site, which was occupied from the 4th millennium B.C. right to the Crusader period", Claude Doumet-Serhal, an archaeologist and director of the Sidon Excavation who is a co-author on the paper, said in an email. The archaeological team has found 160 burials in all, but it's rare in these conditions for DNA to be preserved. "It's nice to see that what we observed wasn't a fluke of our particular site, but was part of this broader Canaanite population", Lazaridis says.

"If those populations conquer each other, it probably wouldn't leave traces that we could easily pick up [with ancient DNA]", agrees Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who wasn't involved in the current work.