Such a source is the Old Testament of the Bible, which for many Canaanites, after the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, a horrible end suspects God ordered them to destroy Canaan and his people (although other passages suggest suggests that some of the Canaanites) Have survived. But what really happened? Archaeological evidence that the Canaanäerstädte were never destroyed or abandoned. Now ancient DNA won Canaanite five skeletons suggest that these people live their genes to help millions of people survive today.The new samples come from Sidon, a coastal town in Lebanon. Marc Haber, a geneticist TrustSanger Institute in Hinxton Welcome, U.K., enough to sequenced DNA from the ancient skeleton to sequence the entire genome of five Canaanite people over 3700 years.The first missionary was, who are the Canaanites, genetically. Ancient Greek sources have suggested that the Levante had migrated from the east. To prove this, Haber and his colleagues compared the Canaanite genomes with those of other ancient peoples of Eurasia. It was found that the Greeks were half-right: about 50% of the Kanaanite genes were local farmers who put Levant there for 10,000 years. But the other half was related to a population identified earlier skeletons in Iran, the team reports today in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The researchers believe that these East migrants came to the Levant and began to mix with the local population there about 5000 years.
This is consistent with other recent studies Levante. Iosif Lazaridis, geneticist at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, saw the same mixture of local and oriental origin in the genomes of ancient skeletons of Jordan. "It's good to see that what we saw was not a coincidence of our particular place, but a part of this larger Canaanite population," says Lazaridis.Now that Haber had confirmed that the Canaanite, pledged himself to find out what happened to them. He compared the genomes with those of 99 Lebanese and hundreds of others in the genetic databases. She noted that the current Lebanese population is largely descended from the ancient Canaanite, which inherits more than 90% of its genes from this ancient source. The other 7% come from Central European immigrants, who moved to the Levant, there are about 3000 years.Is the new study showing that there was war between the Israelis and the Canaanites? Not necessarily, says geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Chris Tyler-Smith, who worked with Haber. The genes do not always follow the conflict. "They may be genetically similar or not distinguish populations that are very different culturally and do not understand at all," says Tyler-Smith. This could have been the case of the Israelites and the Canaanites, similar genes, but archenemies."If these captured populations are likely to leave traces that could easily" capture "with old DNA," agreed Johannes Krause, geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Human History Physics in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the ongoing work. Perhaps it was a biblical war that ancient DNA just can not see.Update, 24:00, July 28: this story and its owners have been updated to reflect that in the Bible, God ordered the destruction of the Canaanites, but some cities and people may have survived.
