Ancient DNA | Bronze Age Levant | The Canaanites

The Canaanites never disappeared

The Bible commands the destruction of the Canaanites, and the Book of Joshua describes it. Ancient DNA tells another story: they are the main ancestors of the peoples who live in the Levant today. From the Bronze Age genomes of Sidon, Megiddo and Baq'ah to present-day Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians, we traced the line in Global25.

73 genomesfrom five sites of the Bronze and Iron Age Southern Levant, published by Agranat-Tamir and colleagues in 2020
About half and halfof Canaanite ancestry is local Neolithic Levantine, the rest related to the Zagros mountains and the Caucasus
Over 80%of the ancestry of present-day Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians still comes from these Bronze Age Canaanites

Hero image: AI generated illustration of a Canaanite port city on the Levantine coast in the Middle Bronze Age, about 1800 BC, with mudbrick ramparts, a temple, merchant ships and traders in the dress of the period. Clothing, architecture and the scene are approximations, and it is not a reconstruction of any documented place or of the individuals whose genomes are discussed here.

"Thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." The Book of Deuteronomy, here in the King James Version, is blunt about the fate the Israelites were commanded to bring on the Canaanites, and the Book of Joshua describes city after city put to the sword. The Bible itself is less certain: the Book of Judges lists the towns that could not be taken, Megiddo among them, and admits that "the Canaanites would dwell in that land". But it is the first version that stuck. For centuries, the Canaanites were remembered as a vanished people.

They were nothing of the kind. The Canaanites were the great Bronze Age civilisation of the Levant, the people of Megiddo and Hazor, of Sidon and Tyre, whose script, carried abroad by their Phoenician descendants, became the ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets. And far from disappearing, their DNA still makes up the largest part of the ancestry of most of the peoples who live in the Levant today. We tested it in Global25.

A people said to have vanishedKey dates in Canaanite history, from the first cities to the ancient genomes3500 to 2000 BCThe first citiesEarly Bronze Age towns rise across the land later called Canaan,trading with Egypt and Mesopotamia.about 1700 BCSidon and the city-statesThe Middle Bronze Age, the golden age of the Canaanitecity-states. Our Sidon genomes date from here.1350 BCThe Amarna lettersCanaanite kings write to the pharaoh in Akkadian. The nameKinahhi, Canaan, appears in the diplomatic archives.about 1200 BCThe Late Bronze Age collapseCities burn across the eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Peoplesarrive; the Israelites and Arameans emerge.1100 to 300 BCThe PhoeniciansThe coastal Canaanites, now called Phoenicians by the Greeks,spread the alphabet and found Carthage.2017 and 2020The genomesHaber and colleagues sequence Bronze Age Sidon; Agranat-Tamirand colleagues publish 73 Bronze and Iron Age genomes.Dates are approximate and follow standard Near Eastern chronology.
Key dates in the history of Canaan, from the Early Bronze Age cities to the ancient genomes. Dates follow standard Near Eastern chronology.

Who were the Canaanites?

"Canaanite" is a label from the outside and the inside at once. The people of the Bronze Age Levant did not form a single state; they lived in a patchwork of city-states, each with its own king, from Byblos and Sidon in the north to Ashkelon and Gaza in the south. But they spoke closely related Semitic languages and shared a pantheon, a material culture and, the Egyptian archives tell us, a name: the land of Canaan, Kinahhi in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC.

In 2020, Lily Agranat-Tamir, David Reich and a large team published genome-wide data for 73 individuals of the Bronze and Iron Ages from five sites: Abel Beth Maacah, Tel Megiddo, Tel Shadud and Yehud in Israel, and Baq'ah in Jordan. Three years earlier, Marc Haber and colleagues had sequenced the whole genomes of five people buried in Sidon, on the Lebanese coast, between 3,750 and 3,650 years ago. Together these studies allow us to ask three simple questions. Were the Canaanites one people? Where did they come from? And what became of them?

One people, made of two

We modelled the Canaanite genomes in Global25 as a mixture of two sources: the earlier Neolithic farmers of the Levant, and a population from further east, related to the Chalcolithic people of the Zagros mountains of Iran and the Bronze Age Caucasus.

One people across the city-statesCanaanite groups modelled as local Neolithic plus a Zagros and Caucasus source in Global25 (our analysis)0%25%50%75%100%fitMegiddo and Galilee14 genomes514929Baq'ah, Jordan17 genomes524827Sidon, Lebanon5 genomes514925Jordan, Early Bronze Age3 genomes623844Levant NeolithicZagros and Caucasus (Chalcolithic Iran)Nearly the same recipe everywhere, 11 to 13 units apart: one people. The split shifts with the eastern proxy (local share 41 to 51% with the best fits).
Canaanite groups from Israel, Jordan and Lebanon modelled as Levant Neolithic (Israel PPNB) plus a Chalcolithic Iranian source (Seh Gabi) in Global25 (our analysis). The groups give nearly the same recipe and cluster within 11 to 13 units, a single people. With another good proxy (Hajji Firuz) the local share is 41% instead of 51%.

The answer to the first question is yes. Whether from Megiddo in Israel, Baq'ah in Jordan or Sidon in Lebanon, the Canaanites give almost the same result: roughly half local Neolithic ancestry, half eastern, with the two best-fitting eastern proxies, both from Chalcolithic Iran, putting the local share between 41 and 51%. The three groups sit only 11 to 13 units apart in Global25, the kind of distance you expect within a single population. The city-states were politically separate but genetically one people, exactly as the shared "Canaanite" material culture suggested. Of the two men from Sidon, one carried Y-chromosome haplogroup J1 and the other J2, paternal lineages that are still among the most common in the Levant today.

The second question, where they came from, has the more interesting answer. The eastern, Zagros and Caucasus related half of their ancestry was not there in the Neolithic. It arrived through a long movement of people out of the northeast: Agranat-Tamir and colleagues see it already 4,500 years ago, probably begun earlier, and continuing at least into the Late Bronze Age, and Haber and colleagues dated the mixing to between about 6,600 and 3,550 years ago. The Canaanites were themselves the product of migration, a blend of the first farmers of the Levant with newcomers related to the peoples of the Zagros and the Caucasus. Our three Early Bronze Age individuals from Jordan, older than the others, carry more local Neolithic ancestry (62%), in line with an eastern share that grew over time, although three genomes are too few to be sure.

A note on the sources. Global25 cannot tell apart every population of the ancient Near East; the "Zagros and Caucasus" source stands for a broad northeastern ancestry, not one specific people. The exact split depends on the proxy: with Neolithic Iranians or Chalcolithic Armenians the local share rises to 48 to 70%, but those models fit clearly worse. What is robust is that a large part of Canaanite ancestry, around half, came from outside the Levant's own Neolithic, from the direction of Iran and the Caucasus.

What became of them

Now the third question, the one that matters for the headline. If you take a present-day Levantine population and ask how much of its ancestry traces back to these Bronze Age Canaanites, the answer is: most of it.

The Canaanites are still herePresent-day Levantine populations modelled as Bronze Age Canaanite plus later arrivals (our analysis)0%25%50%75%100%fitSamaritan9824Lebanese Christian9122Lebanese Druze871322Druze871325Lebanese Muslim841422Syrian811522Palestinian8116Jordanian8414Bedouin711519Bronze Age CanaaniteSteppe and EuropeanEast AfricanArabianCanaanite source: our Sidon average (Megiddo or Baq'ah give the same shares within 2 points). Haber 2017: about 93% for the Lebanese.
Present-day Levantine populations modelled as Bronze Age Canaanite (our Sidon average) plus steppe and European, East African and Arabian sources (our analysis). The Canaanite share stays above 80% everywhere except among the Bedouin, for whom it largely stands for shared Near Eastern ancestry. Using Megiddo or Baq'ah instead of Sidon changes the shares by 2 points at most.

In our model, present-day Lebanese Christians draw about 91% of their ancestry from the Bronze Age Canaanites of Sidon, with the small remainder from a steppe and European source that arrived later. Lebanese Druze and Muslims, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians all sit above 80%. These shares barely move, by one or two points, whether we use the Canaanites of Sidon, Megiddo or Baq'ah as the source. And they match the published work: Haber and colleagues found that present-day Lebanese derive about 93% of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, the rest coming from a Eurasian population that arrived between about 3,750 and 2,170 years ago, a period of successive conquests by distant powers. They also point out that coastal cities such as Sidon and Tyre have been occupied without a break from the Bronze Age to the present.

The communities differ in the details, and the differences are history written in DNA. Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians carry a few percent of East African and Arabian ancestry, probably in large part from movements after the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Bedouin carry the most Arabian ancestry of all, and for them, whose ancestors came largely from Arabia, much of the "Canaanite" share stands for Near Eastern ancestry in general rather than direct descent from the Bronze Age Levant. The same caution applies, to a lesser degree, to everyone: the model cannot fully separate descent from the Canaanites from descent from their close neighbours. The Samaritans, a community of fewer than a thousand people that has married within itself for many centuries, come out the most Canaanite of all, at 98%, and the closest present-day population to the Bronze Age sample. Part of that is real continuity; part is the genetic drift a very small, closed community accumulates, so the exact figure should not be over-read.

Who is closest to a Bronze Age Canaanite?Global25 distance from the Sidon Canaanite average to present-day populations (our analysis)0153045Samaritan25Lebanese Orthodox Christian Koura32Lebanese Christian34Lebanese Maronite Christian Zgharta34Palestinian Beit Sahour34Lebanese Sunni Muslim Dinniyeh35Karaite Iraq43Lebanese Druze43Druze44Distances x 1000. Gold: Levantine groups. The Samaritans come first, partly through the drift of a very small community.
Global25 distance from the Sidon Canaanite average to present-day populations (our analysis). The Samaritans and Lebanese communities come closest; the Samaritan figure partly reflects the drift of a very small, endogamous community.

What the Bible described as annihilation, genetics describes as continuity. The religions, the languages and the rulers of the Levant changed many times over three thousand years, from Canaanite to Israelite and Aramean, to Phoenician and Judaean, to the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Arab worlds. But the people, in the main, stayed. Even later conquerors left surprisingly little: the Crusaders who ruled Sidon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries left a genetic trace that has since largely faded, as we showed in our article on the Sidon Crusaders. The Canaanites were not replaced. They became the ancestors of the Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians, and Agranat-Tamir and colleagues found the same Bronze Age Levantine ancestry, in varying proportions, in many present-day Jewish groups. That shared inheritance runs across Christian, Muslim, Druze, Samaritan and Jewish communities alike, and it cannot settle modern political questions, which genetics was never meant to answer.

The alphabet people

There is a reason this matters beyond the Levant. The alphabet was first developed early in the second millennium BC, probably in Egypt and Sinai, by speakers of Canaanite or closely related Semitic languages. The coastal Canaanites, whom the Greeks called Phoenicians, standardised it and carried it across the Mediterranean, to Greece, to Carthage, to Iberia. The Greek, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets descend from it, and so, through Aramaic, do the Hebrew and Arabic scripts; many scholars think the scripts of India do too. The people the Bible consigned to destruction not only survived in their homeland; they gave the world the letters these very words are written in.

Key points

  • The Canaanites were the Bronze Age people of the Levant, organised in city-states but sharing one language and culture, and the ancestors of the Phoenicians.
  • In Global25, Canaanites from Israel, Jordan and Lebanon give almost the same ancestry, roughly half local Neolithic Levantine and half related to the Zagros and Caucasus, and cluster tightly together.
  • That eastern half arrived through gradual migration from the northeast across the Bronze Age; the Canaanites were themselves a mixed population.
  • Present-day Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians draw over 80% of their ancestry from these Canaanites; published work puts the Lebanese figure near 93%.
  • The Samaritans, long endogamous, come out the most Canaanite of all, partly through the drift of a very small community.
  • Far from being destroyed, the Canaanites are the genetic backbone of the modern Levant, an inheritance shared across its religious communities, and the source of the alphabet.

Global25 coordinates used in this article

The Canaanite groups, the model sources and a few present-day populations. They can be pasted directly into the Vahaduo tool.

Canaanite_Sidon_Lebanon_MBA,0.081763,0.147590,-0.060025,-0.100507,-0.012823,-0.037650,-0.003525,-0.007346,0.011931,0.008778,0.009554,-0.011040,0.022002,0.003487,-0.005565,0.007447,-0.000283,-0.000739,-0.000147,0.006753,0.004534,0.008264,-0.002177,0.001988,-0.003632
Canaanite_Megiddo_Israel_MLBA,0.086180,0.147542,-0.062467,-0.099369,-0.012837,-0.040340,-0.005237,-0.008489,0.015003,0.009554,0.010868,-0.011422,0.022787,0.001327,-0.007164,0.005673,-0.005811,0.005077,0.003726,0.008647,0.005401,0.007507,-0.003724,-0.000964,-0.003618
Canaanite_Baqah_Jordan_LBA,0.087912,0.147073,-0.060894,-0.104196,-0.010898,-0.037207,-0.007824,-0.009366,0.013944,0.008640,0.009600,-0.011240,0.024284,0.000502,-0.007776,0.013813,0.000552,0.003257,0.002536,0.008188,0.005608,0.006175,-0.004654,0.001687,-0.002205
Israel_PPNB_Levant_Neolithic_source,0.070570,0.174671,-0.032809,-0.147612,0.036930,-0.068886,-0.018331,-0.009230,0.077719,0.043554,0.011205,-0.012589,0.027800,-0.006744,-0.023480,0.009944,0.020340,-0.008742,-0.001885,0.024637,0.000749,0.007048,-0.004807,-0.005422,-0.008742
Iran_Chalcolithic_SehGabi_source,0.081042,0.116989,-0.103180,-0.055039,-0.067089,-0.011490,0.006298,-0.007384,-0.047163,-0.018005,0.000325,0.001319,-0.001160,-0.000330,0.002334,0.017661,-0.002842,0.003750,0.008799,-0.014707,0.006464,-0.005614,-0.003081,-0.014797,0.006443
Steppe_Yamnaya_Samara_source,0.125838,0.089254,0.042908,0.115456,-0.027868,0.044685,0.004491,-0.002949,-0.054858,-0.072996,0.001858,0.000350,-0.001652,-0.023610,0.037263,0.015734,0.000000,-0.001478,-0.001704,0.012506,-0.003120,0.001374,0.011229,0.018436,-0.004524
Lebanese_Christian_today,0.088149,0.145785,-0.048858,-0.078848,-0.012891,-0.030740,-0.000496,-0.004282,0.005181,0.010225,0.006658,-0.004529,0.010390,0.000000,-0.010315,0.008471,-0.002101,0.001788,0.002542,-0.000125,0.000763,-0.000302,-0.001410,0.002356,-0.001211
Druze_today,0.088782,0.140143,-0.048875,-0.072417,-0.013172,-0.023817,-0.001763,-0.004061,-0.001391,0.006870,0.005408,-0.003492,0.007522,0.000083,-0.006542,0.007398,-0.000013,0.000899,0.004550,-0.002376,-0.004205,0.002003,-0.001146,0.000374,0.003090
Palestinian_today,0.045529,0.134253,-0.047329,-0.078005,-0.012649,-0.029730,-0.006228,-0.001985,0.016751,-0.000310,0.008184,-0.009636,0.020307,-0.001321,-0.000950,0.009745,-0.002008,-0.001761,0.000088,0.002539,0.001135,0.005280,-0.000160,0.002398,0.001844
Samaritan_today,0.085367,0.148674,-0.057398,-0.092508,-0.009602,-0.035029,-0.002209,-0.008169,0.016321,0.008237,0.009159,-0.009921,0.020485,0.011863,-0.005537,0.002121,-0.011239,0.001014,0.002112,-0.003652,-0.000524,0.003116,0.000567,-0.002940,0.004646

References

  1. Ancient DNA Agranat-Tamir L, Waldman S, Martin MAS, Gokhman D, Mishol N, et al., Finkelstein I, Carmel L, Reich D (2020). The genomic history of the Bronze Age Southern Levant. Cell 181(5): 1146 to 1157.e11. doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.024
  2. Ancient DNA Haber M, Doumet-Serhal C, Scheib C, Xue Y, Danecek P, et al., Zalloua P, Tyler-Smith C (2017). Continuity and admixture in the last five millennia of Levantine history from ancient Canaanite and present-day Lebanese genome sequences. American Journal of Human Genetics 101(2): 274 to 282. doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.06.013
  3. Ancient DNA Haber M, Doumet-Serhal C, Scheib CL, Xue Y, Mikulski R, et al., Tyler-Smith C (2019). A transient pulse of genetic admixture from the Crusaders in the Near East identified from ancient genome sequences. American Journal of Human Genetics 104(5): 977 to 984. doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2019.03.015
  4. Data Global25 coordinates by Davidski (Eurogenes), and the Moriopoulos Collection 2026 of averages. Admixture models and figures: ExploreYourDNA.