First Phoenician DNA is European

[littlefieldjohn]

By TNO Staff 5/28/16

Traditional historical accounts which claim the Phoenicians were all Semitic has been turned on its head with the news that ancient DNA extracted from a 2,500-year-old Phoenician skeleton has unquestionably shown European racial origins.

The study found that the DNA of the famous “’Young Man of Byrsa,” was an extremely rare—and exclusively European marker—and that this is likely the result of extensive admixture with Europeans.


The study, published in the PLOS ONE journal, was conducted by a research team under the leadership of Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, Professor of Anatomy, from New Zealand’s University of Otago, and is titled “A European Mitochondrial Haplotype Identified in Ancient Phoenician Remains from Carthage, North Africa.”

Professor Matisoo-Smith’s team recovered DNA from the skeleton found in a tomb in Carthage, Tunisia in 1994. It is the very first ancient DNA to be obtained from Phoenician remains.

Professor Matisoo-Smith said the findings provide the earliest evidence of the European mitochondrial haplogroup U5b2c1 in North Africa and date its arrival to at least the late sixth century BC.

“U5b2c1 is considered to be one of the most ancient haplogroups in Europe and is associated with hunter-gatherer populations there. It is remarkably rare in modern populations today, found in Europe at levels of less than 1 percent,” she said.

While the Phoenicians are thought to have originated from the area that is now Lebanon, their influence expanded across the Mediterranean and west to the Iberian Peninsula where they established settlements and trading posts.

The city of Carthage in Tunisia, North Africa, was established as a Phoenician port by colonists from Lebanon and became the center for later Phoenician (Punic) trade.

Later, Carthage became Rome’s greatest early enemy, and a series of wars, known as the Punic Wars, erupted, ending in Carthage’s total destruction, resulting in the effective disappearance of the Phoenician culture.

Previous research has found that U5b2c1 was present in two ancient hunter-gatherers recovered from an archaeological site in northwestern Spain, Professor Matisoo-Smith said.

“This result not only provides the first direct ancient DNA evidence of a Phoenician individual but the earliest evidence of a European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5b2c1, in North Africa,” the research paper continues.

The paper said that items buried with the skeleton dated from the late sixth century BC. The first indication that he was not Semitic came with a cranial analysis, the paper said: “An osteological analysis of the young man from Byrsa, or Ariche, as he has become known, determined that he was approximately 1.7 m tall and aged between 19 and 24 years, and a craniometric analysis indicated likely Mediterranean/European ancestry as opposed to African or Asian.”

http://newobserveronline.com/first-p...-dna-european/