Rewriting History: Study Challenges Long-Held Assumptions About Phoenician Civilization

Study challenges long-standing beliefs about the Mediterranean Phoenician-Punic civilization, a culture recognized as one of the most influential maritime powers in history.

The Phoenician culture originated in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant and introduced major innovations, including the first alphabet, an ancestor to many modern writing systems. By the early first millennium BCE, Phoenician cities had created an extensive maritime network of trading posts reaching as far as Iberia. Through these networks, they spread their culture, religion, and language throughout the central and western Mediterranean.

By the 6th century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician colony on the coast of present-day Tunisia, had become the dominant power in the region. Culturally, Phoenician communities associated with or governed by Carthage became known as “Punic” by the Romans. Carthage is remembered in history for the Punic Wars against the Roman Republic, including the famed military campaign in which General Hannibal crossed the Alps.

In a study conducted under the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, co-directed by Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Michael McCormick of Harvard University, an international research team has now revealed new genetic evidence that reshapes our understanding of these ancient civilizations.

New perspective on the spread of Phoenician culture

The new study aimed to use ancient DNA to characterize Punic people’s ancestry and look for genetic links between them and Levantine Phoenicians, with whom they share a common culture and language. This was made possible by sequencing and analyzing a large sample of genomes from human remains buried in 14 Phoenician and Punic archaeological sites spanning the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, and the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza.

The researchers revealed an unexpected result.

“We find surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians to western and central Mediterranean Punic populations,” says lead author Harald Ringbauer, who was a post-doctoral scientist at Harvard University when he began this research, and is now a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “This provides a new perspective on how Phoenician culture spread—not through large-scale mass migration, but through a dynamic process of cultural transmission and assimilation.”

The study highlights that Punic sites were home to people with vastly different ancestry profiles. “We observe a genetic profile in the Punic world that was extraordinarily heterogeneous,” says David Reich, a professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University who co-led the work. “At each site, people were highly variable in their ancestry, with the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary people of Sicily and the Aegean, and many people with significant North African-associated ancestry as well.”

Ancient DNA reveals cosmopolitan nature of Punic world

The results underscore the Punic world’s cosmopolitan nature. Individuals with North African ancestry lived next to and intermingled with a majority of people of mainly Sicilian-Aegean ancestry in all sampled Punic sites, including Carthage.

Moreover, genetic networks across the Mediterranean suggest that shared demographic processes—such as trade, intermarriage, and population mixing—played a critical role in shaping these communities. The researchers even found a pair of close relatives (ca. second cousins) bridging the Mediterranean, one buried in a North African Punic site and one in Sicily.

“These findings reinforce the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, with people moving and mixing across often large geographic distances,” says Ilan Gronau, a professor of Computer Science at Reichman University in ​​Herzliya, Israel, who co-led the work. He adds: “Such studies highlight the power of ancient DNA in its ability to shed light on the ancestry and mobility of historical populations for which we have relatively sparse direct historical records.”

Reference: “Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors” by Harald Ringbauer, Ayelet Salman-Minkov, Dalit Regev, Iñigo Olalde, Tomer Peled, Luca Sineo, Gioacchino Falsone, Peter van Dommelen, Alissa Mittnik, Iosif Lazaridis, Davide Pettener, Maria Bofill, Ana Mezquida, Benjamí Costa, Helena Jiménez, Patricia Smith, Stefania Vai, Alessandra Modi, Arie Shaus, Kim Callan, Elizabeth Curtis, Aisling Kearns, Ann Marie Lawson, Matthew Mah, Adam Micco, Jonas Oppenheimer, Lijun Qiu, Kristin Stewardson, J. Noah Workman, Nicholas Márquez-Grant, Antonio M. Sáez Romero, María Luisa Lavado Florido, Juan Manuel Jiménez-Arenas, Isidro Jorge Toro Moyano, Enrique Viguera, José Suárez Padilla, Sonia López Chamizo, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Esther Lizano, Alicia Rodero Riaza, Francesca Olivieri, Pamela Toti, Valentina Giuliana, Alon Barash, Liran Carmel, Elisabetta Boaretto, Marina Faerman, Michaela Lucci, Francesco La Pastina, Alessia Nava, Francesco Genchi, Carla Del Vais, Gabriele Lauria, Francesca Meli, Paola Sconzo, Giulio Catalano, Elisabetta Cilli, Anna Chiara Fariselli, Francesco Fontani, Donata Luiselli, Brendan J. Culleton, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Lorenzo Nigro, Alfredo Coppa, David Caramelli, Ron Pinhasi, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Ilan Gronau and David Reich, 23 April 2025, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08913-3

Funding: NIH/National Institutes of Health, John Templeton Foundation

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