Posted on 07/03/2019 1:16:54 PM PDT by Red Badger
JERUSALEM — Goliath the Greek? Human remains from an ancient cemetery in southern Israel have yielded precious bits of DNA that a new study says help prove the European origin of the Philistines — the enigmatic nemeses of the biblical Israelites.
The Philistines mostly resided in five cities along the southern coast of what is today Israel and the Gaza Strip during the early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. In the Bible, David fought the Philistine giant Goliath in a duel, and Samson slew a thousand of their warriors with the jawbone of an ass.
Many archaeologists have proposed they migrated to the coast of the ancient Near East during a period of upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C.
The Philistines emerged as other societies around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed, possibly because of a cataclysmic intersection of climate change and man-made disasters. Philistine ceramics bear similarities to styles found in the Aegean, but concrete evidence of their geographic origins has remained elusive.
Now, a study of genetic material extracted from skeletons unearthed in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon in 2013 has found a DNA link. It connects the Philistines to populations in southern Europe during the Bronze Age.
The study, spearheaded by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute and Wheaton College in Illinois, was published Wednesday in the research journal Science Advances.
The biblical account relates that the Philistines originally hailed from a distant isle. An Egyptian temple built by Rameses III bears reliefs of battles with “Sea Peoples” who appeared on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. One group listed in the Egyptian text is strikingly similar to the Hebrew name for Philistines. Excavations of Philistine sites have found ceramics and architecture that differed from those of their neighbors in ancient Canaan.
But archaeologists can’t be absolutely certain that different pots mean different people.
Eric Cline, an archaeologist from George Washington University specializing in the Late Bronze Age in the Near East, said conclusive evidence has eluded scientists until now — even if the material remains have indicated that the Philistines migrated to the Levant from the Aegean around 1200 B.C.
Cline, who was not involved in the study, is the author of “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” which examines the period when the Philistines arrived. He called the paper’s findings “extremely exciting and very important” by helping resolve the long-standing mystery about their origins.
“We were all hoping that it might be possible to get genetic information like this,” he said. “Now we have scientific confirmation from DNA that the Philistines do indeed most likely come from that region.”
The researchers looked at DNA from 10 skeletons excavated from the ancient cemetery in Ashkelon, one of the Philistine seaports.
Using Carbon-14 dating technology, three were determined to be from the centuries before the Philistines’ presumed arrival around 1200 B.C., four were from the period immediately afterward, and three dated to centuries further on, the late Iron Age.
The study found that the remains dating to the early Iron Age — the period associated with many of the stories involving Philistines in the Bible — were genetically distinct from their Levantine neighbors, and had close similarities with populations in southern Europe.
“We see in their DNA a European component from the West that appears in a substantial enough way that we can demonstrate it statistically, we can show that it’s different,” said Daniel Master, an archaeologist with Wheaton College who headed the expedition in Ashkelon. “It basically says the people came from outside, not just the style of pottery.”
He said the findings were “direct evidence” that the cultural change found in Philistine cities “reflected the migration of a group of people.”
The DNA from the later individuals found they had some southern European genes, but appeared much closer to the surrounding Canaanite population.
“There was this pulse of people coming in, and then they kind of mixed in into the local population, so a few hundred years later they are almost indistinguishable” from the surrounding Levantine gene pool, said Michal Feldman, an archeogeneticist at the Planck Institute and one of the paper’s lead authors.
The results point to a possible southern European origin for the Philistines — anywhere from Cyprus to Sardinia — but further study of ancient remains is needed to narrow down the search.
“Until we have more samples from the neighboring regions,” and from the Philistines themselves, said Feldman, “I don’t think we can pinpoint better their homeland or homelands.”
No, they're just doing science.
I have the book. Too bad he's dead wrong about the dates, and about the Bronze Age "collapse".
Do you have a link to that?
Yep. Since the Philistines were Israel’s enemy he so named it; but that didn’t create a state of Palestine. That area was ruled first by Israel, then the Romans, then the Ottomans then the Brits who called it the Mandate, then the UN vote to reestablish the area as Israel, then came the Arab invasion, then Israel won and on several other occasions.
PS: Titus didn’t actually wipe out Israel, there were always Jews in the region with their own towns. The Romans conquered it then ruled it until the Ottomans kicked them out.
That’s the reason Rome named it Palestine after Israel’s hated enemy.
A link to?....
the correct years as compared to what is in Eric Clines book. - of course you have links ;.)
I’ll work on it! Meanwhile, here’s a new one, followed by two older ones:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/bronzeagecollapse/index
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/erichcline/index
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/1177bc/index
Thanks, that will keep me occupied for a month!
I noticed the Eric has been here http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:ehcline/index?tab=comments;brevity=full;options=no-change
I remember it, it was nice of him to stop by. His dating remains wrong. You'll find plenty of posts and links of mine in those keyword topics. :^)
Even a Patrician blue blooded family like the Bush clan has native Americans intertwined in their New England roots.
My wife is a distant cousin of baseball star Rogers Hornsby descended from a common half-sister of Pocohantas . . . and more than a century later, we have common Cherokee ancestry which married into settler line on the Georgia/Carolina/Tennessee frontiers. There are remote areas still with sizeable Cherokee populations who escaped the forced removal in 1838 either because (a)they were sufficiently intermarried with settlers or (b)in locations too remote and/or numbers too few to bother with rounding up.
What you describe is correct, it’s a matter of degree. Certainly English immigrants intermarried with natives, but every English settlement included women, even early Jamestown. I am a descendant of a family who were on the 2d Supply. Even the Adventurers during the Virginia Company era were interested in establishing wealthly estates that would include English family members.
Spanish and French settlements were almost exclusively male, either military or Adventurers seeking precious metals or jewels. Not very many farmers except among the clergy who were, officially, celebate.
Most of the first families of Virginia were descended from Pocahontas. Her line was a very fine thread as most of her line was continued by a single person until one finally had several children.
“My wife is a distant cousin of baseball star Rogers Hornsby descended from a common half-sister of Pocohantas . . . and more than a century later, we have common Cherokee ancestry which married into settler line on the Georgia/Carolina/Tennessee frontiers. There are remote areas still with size able Cherokee populations who escaped the forced removal in 1838 either because (a)they were sufficiently intermarried with settlers or (b)in locations too remote and/or numbers too few to bother with rounding up.”
Does this Cherokee lineage show up in your wife’s DNA?
We supposedly via written documentation have lineage with your wife’s ancestor and her father, uncles and aunts. Yet zero DNA showing any Indian blood in our DNA.
“Exactly. Minoan refugees from the Thera volcano.”
The fact that Dagon is a male diety (and the Minoans were supposedly goddess worshipers) made me doubt this at first, but Dagon is often represented as a fish-man, and fish play a very prominent part in Minoan art. Plus, the Minoans were practitioners of ritual child sacrifice AND cannibalism: there’s lots of evidence from mass graves of children that the kids were butchered just like a food animal. So it would make sense that the local tribes that God so hated in the Old Testament descended from these awful people.
Growing up, I LOVED Greek history, and Minoan history (and it’s mysteries) were a fascination of mine. It was such a disappointment to find out that the people that constructed such beautiful (even magical ) places like the Palace of Knossos were sacrificing and eating their own children in honor of dark deities.
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