A group of scientists from the University of Otago and the Lebanese American University have recently succeeded at sequencing and analyzing the DNA obtained from the remaining of a 2500-year-old Phoenician called “The Young Man of Byrsa”. Their work is of good importance because we know less information about the Phoenicians than other populations, and this analysis will help uncover more about their culture and origins.
You can check the research details along with the results the scientists obtained here. What caught my attention the most though was the conclusion that modern Lebanese (47 of them to be precise) are not related to the Phoenicians! It is quite weird to be honest given how we pride ourselves with the Phoenicians being our ancestors, and the fact that they’re thought to have originated from here and expanded to the west.
I hope some other research soon reveals we also have no relation with the Arab world so we can dissociate ourselves from all the chaos around us!
photo via Modern Readers