“Anthropologists have always said that language, culture and genetics are connected, but they don’t necessarily, inherently, always go together,” van Dommelen said. “Throughout history, we see people move to new lands, adopt different customs, mingle with people from different cultures and create new languages. Their identities shift and don’t necessarily align with their ancestry. It’s what we’ve seen happen over the course of American history. Evidently, it’s also what happened with Punic people in the Mediterranean.”

Levantine losses

Punic people, also known as Phoenicians or Carthaginians, first migrated from the Levant as early as the 12th century B.C. Known as adept sea voyagers and purveyors of a unique purple dye made from seashells, they sailed to and settled on islands across the Mediterranean and on the mainlands of present-day Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Libya. Their largest settlement was the city of Carthage in present-day Tunisia. 

The Punic empire thrived for centuries as the dominant power in the Mediterranean, until the rise of the Roman Republic. Over the course of about 100 years, beginning in the third century B.C., Rome gradually loosened the seafarers’ hold on the Mediterranean in the Punic Wars, which culminated in the violent destruction of Carthage in the second century B.C.

The researchers’ DNA samples come mostly from the bones of people who lived in the second half of the Punic empire’s history, between the sixth and second centuries B.C. The 210 samples came from 14 Punic settlements across the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia, Algeria and the Balearic island Ibiza.

There’s ample evidence that these people practiced Levantine customs, built Levantine-style structures and spoke the Levantine-derived Punic language, van Dommelen said. Yet according to the DNA analysis, almost none of them had any trace of Levantine ancestry. Instead, the study found, their genetic profiles looked most like those of prehistoric inhabitants of Sicily and the Aegean. Some of them also showed varying degrees of North African ancestry, especially those who died after 400 B.C., reflecting the growing influence of Carthage in the Mediterranean.

“That seems to show there were close connections between the Punic settlements in Sardinia, Sicily, Greece, North Africa, Ibiza and Spain,” van Dommelen said. “Their settlements seemed to be more connected with each other, via maritime routes, than with their local neighbors in the hinterlands. It’s comparable to what happened with early white settlers in North America: The colonies were more closely connected to each other than they were to people in the interior parts of the continent.”

Change is the only constant

When exactly did Punic peoples’ Levantine roots disappear? Van Dommelen said researchers may never know for sure: Before the sixth century, it was standard cultural practice to cremate the dead, leaving behind no trace of DNA. 

“The funerary rituals seem to have changed in the sixth century B.C., when we start to see more people burying their dead,” van Dommelen said. “So that raises new questions: When did that genetic fingerprint disappear? When, and why, was the Canaanite-Phoenician culture and language adopted by people without any detectable Levantine ancestry?”

The archaeologist has some educated guesses. Perhaps many of the first Levantine settlers married people from the islands they colonized, and Punic peoples’ Levantine ancestry diminished quickly as a result, even as they continued practicing Levantine traditions. Perhaps those early colonizers weren’t all Levantine; the seafaring settlers may have been a mix of eastern and western Mediterranean people.

In the years to come, van Dommelen and his colleagues will search for answers. He’s already working with Spanish peers on an examination of the cultural changes Punic settlements underwent in the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries B.C. in modern-day Spain. And he’ll continue a longstanding excavation of S’Urachi, an ancient settlement on Sardinia, where there’s evidence that Indigenous architectural and cultural practices began changing between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. because of Phoenician colonizers’ influence.

“Over the course of a century, all of the pottery they used for eating and drinking changed,” van Dommelen said. “They produced it locally with their own clay, but they started using different techniques and designing it in a totally Phoenician style. We’ve also found a fifth century B.C. house that looks completely Phoenician — rectangular, adobe walls, flat roof — and very different from the traditional Indigenous houses, which were round and made of stone. We see cultures changing and mixing.”

To van Dommelen, it’s a tale as old as time. People travel, connect and change — it’s what they did then, and it’s what they do now, he said.

“There seems to be a narrative today that our countries and economies are more interconnected than they used to be,” van Dommelen said. “But we have evidence that the ancient Mediterranean was a big, interconnected web of people and ideas. It wasn’t just Greeks and Romans — it was a lot more diverse and a lot more complicated.”