Ancient DNA analysis challenges our understanding of the ancient Phoenician-Punic civilization. An international team of researchers analyzing genome-wide data from 210 ancient individuals has found that Levantine Phoenician towns contributed little genetically to Punic populations in the central and western Mediterranean despite their deep cultural, economic, and linguistic connections.
The Phoenician culture emerged in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant, developing prominent innovations such as the first alphabet (from which many present-day writing systems derive). By the early first millennium BCE, Phoenician cities had established a vast maritime network of trading posts as far as Iberia, spreading their culture, religion, and language throughout the central and western Mediterranean. By the 6th century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician coastal colony in what is now Tunisia, had risen to dominate this region. These culturally Phoenician communities associated with or ruled by Carthage became known as “Punic” by the Romans. The Carthaginian empire left its mark in history, particularly well known for the three large-scale “Punic Wars” with the rising Roman Republic, including the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s surprise campaign to cross the Alps.
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 islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza.
The researchers revealed an unexpected result. “We find 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. “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 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 that “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”. Ron Pinhasi, co-supervisor of the paper and professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna, adds: “It is very exciting that now by harnessing paleogenomic methods we were able to reconstruct the diversity of the Punic people their movements and even their marriage patterns and family composition”.
Dr. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who led the historical and archaeological aspects of the study, adds that “it is striking to realize that people living in these Punic sites, who self-identified as Canaanites, Tyrians, and Sidonians, based on Phoenician and bilingual inscriptions, were not genetically descended from Levantine populations—at least from the late 6th century BCE onward. This finding provides a new perspective on the cultural and religious history of the Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE”.
Original Publication:
Ringbauer, H., Salman-Minkov, A., Regev, D. et al. Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08913-3
Contact:
For more information or to schedule an interview with the research team, please contact:
Univ.-Prof. Ron Pinhasi, PhD
Department for Evolutionary Anthropology
University of Vienna
1030 - Wien, Djerassiplatz 1
+43-1-4277-547 21
+43-664-60277-547 21
ron.pinhasi@univie.ac.at
