New Study Finds over-3000-year-old Ancestry Intact, Not Wiped Out, As Holly Bible Suggests

“I am fascinated by such discoveries…To think that DNA can be preserved for so long and help crack a 4,000-year-old case is beyond imagination.

“You often hear of people being charged for a serious crime many years after it was committed because of new DNA evidence.

“But going back 4,000 years to prove the bible wrong is really pushing the envelop,” Issa said, of a study which found that “the ancient Canaanites, who lived 3,000 – 4,000 years ago were not wiped out, as the Bible suggests, but went on to become modern-day Lebanese,” a revellation that attracted over 4,000 comments on The Telegraph article.

It cited a passage in Deuteronomy, in which God had ordered the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them... so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods.”

But it seems they didn't destroy them all, the research said. By comparing the DNA of the ancient and modern inhabitants, the scientists found over 90 per cent of the ancestry of modern-day Lebanese derived from the Canaanites.

“The Bible reports the destruction of the Canaanite cities and the annihilation of its people; if true, the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations,” the article quoted researchers in the American Journal of Human Genetics as saying.

Moreover, the widespread destruction of Canaanite cities between the Bronze and Iron Ages is not supported by any archaeological evidence found, citing, for example, cities on the Levant coast such as Sidon and Tyre which show continuity of occupation until the present day.

“We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age,” the researchers were quoted as saying.

They compared five whole genomes, obtained from the base of skulls from ancient remains found in the area of Sidon, with those of 99 Lebanese living in the region today, before coming to their conclusion, the article reported.

“One of the most exciting parts of the research was to get DNA out of the specimens,” one of the researchers, Chris Tyler-Smith, was quoted as telling ABC.
The modern-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,” Dr Marc Haber, of The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, was quoted as telling the Independent.