Research published today in Nature, co-led by Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, offers an unexpected new insight into one of the most influential maritime cultures in history.
An international team of researchers, co-led by Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, has studied the genome of 210 individuals and has revealed that the Phoenician cities on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean did not maintain a close genetic relationship with the Punic populations, originated from the expansion of the former through the central and western Mediterranean, despite their deep cultural, economic, and linguistic connections.
Phoenician culture arose in the Bronze Age city-states in the Levant, where today there are, among others, Lebanon and Syria, developing transcendental innovations such as the first alphabet, the origin of many current writing systems. Similarly, by the beginning of the first millennium B.C., these cities had established an extensive maritime trade network that reached as far as the Iberian Peninsula, spreading their culture, religion and language throughout the central and western Mediterranean.
In the sixth century B.C., Carthage -located in present-day Tunisia- became one of the main centres of Phoenician influence, and all the communities that were associated with it became known as “Punic.” The Carthaginian empire left a deep mark on history, especially by the three “Punic Wars” with the Roman Republic, including General Hannibal’s famous campaign across the Alps.
Now, a new study has used ancient DNA techniques to characterize the ancestry of these Punic peoples and look for genetic links between them and the Phoenicians, from whom they came and with whom they shared culture and language. This has been possible by sequencing and analysing a large sample of genomes from human remains buried at 14 Phoenician and Punic archaeological sites spanning the peninsula, the Levant, North Africa, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza.
To the surprise of the researchers, the results have revealed that the Phoenician populations originating in the Levant had a direct genetic contribution that was practically non-existent to the Punic populations of the central and western Mediterranean. 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. This contrasts with the case of the Greeks, with whom they competed as economic and ideological rivals and whose colonies were transplants of the populations of the Aegean Sea, with minimal mixing with the indigenous communities they occupied.
“We observed that the genetic profile of the Punic world was extraordinarily heterogeneous,” says David Reich, a professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology at Harvard who has also co-led the work. “The people of each place had great variability in their ancestry, with most of the genetic source coming from contemporary inhabitants of Sicily and the Aegean, and many of them with a strong North African ancestry.”
Thus, the results underscore the cosmopolitan nature of the Punic world. “Mediterranean genetic networks indicate that the mixing of the Punics with local populations was essential to configure these communities,” says Carles Lalueza-Fox, also a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF). “We have even found a pair of close relatives, roughly second cousins, buried on both sides of the Mediterranean, one in North Africa and the other in Sicily.”
These findings reinforce the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, with people mingling and moving across vast geographical distances. In addition, the study highlights the power of ancient DNA analysis techniques to offer a new understanding about the ancestry and mobility of historical populations, such as the Phoenicians and Punics, for whom direct records are relatively scarce and come almost exclusively from their Greek and Roman rivals and enemies.
- More information:
Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors. Ringbauer H, Salman-Minkov A, Regev D, [64 autors], Lalueza-Fox C, Gronau I & Reich D. Nature. 2025 Feb;
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08913-3