Genetic researchers have found that modern Lebanese people inherited approximately 90% of their genes from the Canaanites.
Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK extracted DNA from five 3700-year-old skeletons from the city of Sidon.
According to his paper in the journal Cell, this DNA was then analysed in order to deduce the genetic heritage of the Canaanites.
What Haber’s research team found that the Canaanites were descended from a mix between a local farming population and Eastern migrants from an earlier Iranian population.
This was consistent with the genetic research of Iosif Lazaridis, who found the same genetic variation in his research into the genetic history of the Canaanites.
Haber also compared the genes to those in modern databases, including the genes of 99 Lebanese individuals. What he found was that about 90% of the genes present in modern Lebanese people came from this ancient source.
According to the Bible, God told the Israelite tribes to wipe out the Canaanites, however the lack of archaeological evidence has previously thrown doubt on this account.
However according to Nature, the researchers caution against such an interpretation for the genetic research, as the ancient Israelite and Canaanite tribes may not have been genetically distinct enough for such a genocide to show up in the genetic record.
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