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The Phoenicians are basically the same as the Canaanites--their name for themselves was the word which get rendered as Canaanite in the Bible. Their language is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family and is thought to have split off (as Proto-Canaanite) maybe about 3800 B.C. but the population of the Levant is probably descended from people who were there earlier. Archaeologists call the culture of the southern Levant from c. 4400 to c. 3500 B.C. "Ghassulian culture" after a site in Jordan near the northern end of the Dead Sea.

According to R. W. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (1962), there is no definite evidence for people in Crete in the Paleolithic period but acknowledges that the average archaeologist working in Crete might not recognize a Paleolithic artefact. I don't know if the picture has changed since 1962. Sir Arthur Evans found evidence of Neolithic habitation at Knossos. The Neolithic seems to go to about 3000 B.C. when the Early Minoan period starts. When the Neolithic era on Crete began is unclear. J.D.S. Pendlebury (a noted British archaeologist who was killed in the German invasion of Crete in 1941) says that Evans suggested that the Neolithic may go back as early as 8000 B.C. but Pendlebury thinks the earliest Neolithic settlers arrived at most a few centuries before 4000 B.C.

It may be that recent studies of the spread of farming from the Near East to Greece and Crete may give a clearer idea of when there were Neolithic inhabitants on Crete. They seem to be ancestral to the later Minoan population (but immigrants from Asia Minor could have entered Crete later as well).

The heyday of Minoan civilization is after 2000 B.C.