Genetic study Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors

And the DNA studies of Tarquinia showed two people there with Levantine ancestry, I forget the exact dates, but pre-imperial for sure
 
Tanit_reigns said:
And the DNA studies of Tarquinia showed two people there with Levantine ancestry, I forget the exact dates, but pre-imperial for sure
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wasn't aware of that amazing 👍
 
WHGuy said:
Yes, but I don't think it showed massive turnover, basically the disappearance of Nuragic Y-DNA, prior to Roman rule. Maybe I am remembering that incorrectly.
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A "massive" turnover Y DNA wise didn't happen since I2-M26 is still the predominant haplogroup in Sardinia, followed by G2a, but new haplogroups like R1b1a1b-M269 started appearing already by the Punic period in the samples from Villamar, according to the Marcus paper.
 
kingdavid said:
wasn't aware of that amazing 👍
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yeah, from moots 2023. both seem to be around 150 -100 CE
 
So in the supplement, they have a list of unpublished individuals shown in the PCA (three that are Egyptian Hellenistic, and several from Menorca and Iberia Iron Age). How is that allowed. And these are different from the already published Egyptian ones. These are the samples IDs they provide and in the publication column it says "unpublished": I3339_noUDG, I3438_noUDG, I4526.

The Egyptian ones from Scheunemann NatureCommunications 2017 are JK2911.AG, JK2888.AG, JK2134.AG
 
Pygmalion said:
A "massive" turnover Y DNA wise didn't happen since I2-M26 is still the predominant haplogroup in Sardinia, followed by G2a, but new haplogroups like R1b1a1b-M269 started appearing already by the Punic period in the samples from Villamar, according to the Marcus paper.
Click to expand...
Interestingly there's a sample with I2a1a1 from a late Punic burial in Cagliari but it's not included in this study.
 
Tanit_reigns said:
And the DNA studies of Tarquinia showed two people there with Levantine ancestry, I forget the exact dates, but pre-imperial for sure
Click to expand...

here you were correct they are for sure bc
so they can be added to the Punic I22119 and the Hellenistic I10392 as one of the oldest cases of Levantine profile outside of the levant

roman republic Levantine outliers( r10337, r10341) from Tarquinia Tuscany
1746453723730.png


source:
www.nature.com

A genetic history of continuity and mobility in the Iron Age central Mediterranean - Nature Ecology & Evolution

The authors generate genomic data from 30 ancient human individuals, spanning the Bronze Age and the Iron Age from four archaeological sites in the Mediterranean (located in Tunisia, Sardinia and central Italy). Comparing with additional published ancient genomes, they generate insights into...
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
I would love to hear the community’s input on this.

There is a theory circling around which proposes that the origins of central and western mediterran Jews, including the predecessors of both Ashkenazi and Spanish Jews, both having significant Italian and East Med ancestry, are to a large degree found within converted Punic people. Its a charming speculation due to some important overlappings:
1. One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time.
2. Roman era proselytizing Judaism (along with their carriers) would be familiar to the culturally Phoenician-Hellenic Punic.
3. And now, with this paper, these Sicillian-Aegean Punics show the same baseline south European admixture found among European and north African Jews.

So, my question is, how well do medieval European Jews are modeled with these new samples? And more interestingly, are these new Punic Y-DNA lineages appear among Western Jews (AJ, SJ, Mustarabim/Berber Jews) ?
 
just_a_simp said:
I would love to hear the community’s input on this.

There is a theory circling around which proposes that the origins of central and western mediterran Jews, including the predecessors of both Ashkenazi and Spanish Jews, both having significant Italian and East Med ancestry, are to a large degree found within converted Punic people. Its a charming speculation due to some important overlappings:
1. One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time.
2. Roman era proselytizing Judaism (along with their carriers) would be familiar to the culturally Phoenician-Hellenic Punic.
3. And now, with this paper, these Sicillian-Aegean Punics show the same baseline south European admixture found among European and north African Jews.

So, my question is, how well do medieval European Jews are modeled with these new samples? And more interestingly, are these new Punic Y-DNA lineages appear among Western Jews (AJ, SJ, Mustarabim/Berber Jews) ?
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That seems very farfetched.

"One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time."
No, Punics didn't disappear at all, there are Punic inscriptions dating to the 3rd century AD and many tophets remained in use in Roman times. The idea that they suddenly disappeared is wrong. Jewish presence in Rome has a lot to do with Rome gaining preminence in the Eastern Mediterranean and having first diplomatic/trade relations with Jews and later conquering them, and basically nothing with Carthage disappearing, other than the fact that its demise along with that of other powers allowed Rome to become the hegemon of the entire Mediterranean Sea.
 
I would love to hear the community’s input on this.

There is a theory circling around which proposes that the origins of central and western mediterran Jews, including the predecessors of both Ashkenazi and Spanish Jews, both having significant Italian and East Med ancestry, are to a large degree found within converted Punic people. Its a charming speculation due to some important overlappings:
1. One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time.
2. Roman era proselytizing Judaism (along with their carriers) would be familiar to the culturally Phoenician-Hellenic Punic.
3. And now, with this paper, these Sicillian-Aegean Punics show the same baseline south European admixture found among European and north African Jews.

So, my question is, how well do medieval European Jews are modeled with these new samples? And more interestingly, are these new Punic Y-DNA lineages appear among Western Jews (AJ, SJ, Mustarabim/Berber Jews) ?
Pygmalion said:
That seems very farfetched.

"One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time."
No, Punics didn't disappear at all, there are Punic inscriptions dating to the 3rd century AD and many tophets remained in use in Roman times. The idea that they suddenly disappeared is wrong. Jewish presence in Rome has a lot to do with Rome gaining preminence in the Eastern Mediterranean and having first diplomatic/trade relations with Jews and later conquering them, and basically nothing with Carthage disappearing, other than the fact that its demise along with that of other powers allowed Rome to become the hegemon of the entire Mediterranean Sea.
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Of course, a sudden disappearance of Punic identity makes as much sense as a sudden emergence of Jewish identity in those same areas. Punic identity eventually disappeared, not suddenly, and its time range of dissipation is around the time that Judaism rises to prominence in the central and eastern med. limiting ourselves to timing alone, is this not correct?

Keep in mind that we have limited to no evidence, aDNA or archeological, of migration and settlement of Levantine Jews in the central and western med, other than in south and central Italy. Rome gaining preeminence in the Eastern Mediterranean and having first diplomatic/trade relations with Jews and later conquering them is not enough to explain the appearance of jewish communities in those western med areas which suspiciously overlap with the old Punic areas. Its also completely possible the connection is simply not there though. But then the question remains, where did these Punic Sicilian-Aegean people go to?

The Y-DNA results of these new Punic samples might shed an unequivocal light on answers to these questions.
 
just_a_simp said:
I would love to hear the community’s input on this.

There is a theory circling around which proposes that the origins of central and western mediterran Jews, including the predecessors of both Ashkenazi and Spanish Jews, both having significant Italian and East Med ancestry, are to a large degree found within converted Punic people. Its a charming speculation due to some important overlappings:
1. One community “disappears” while another “appears” at roughly the same time.
2. Roman era proselytizing Judaism (along with their carriers) would be familiar to the culturally Phoenician-Hellenic Punic.
3. And now, with this paper, these Sicillian-Aegean Punics show the same baseline south European admixture found among European and north African Jews.

So, my question is, how well do medieval European Jews are modeled with these new samples? And more interestingly, are these new Punic Y-DNA lineages appear among Western Jews (AJ, SJ, Mustarabim/Berber Jews) ?

Of course, a sudden disappearance of Punic identity makes as much sense as a sudden emergence of Jewish identity in those same areas. Punic identity eventually disappeared, not suddenly, and its time range of dissipation is around the time that Judaism rises to prominence in the central and eastern med. limiting ourselves to timing alone, is this not correct?

Keep in mind that we have limited to no evidence, aDNA or archeological, of migration and settlement of Levantine Jews in the central and western med, other than in south and central Italy. Rome gaining preeminence in the Eastern Mediterranean and having first diplomatic/trade relations with Jews and later conquering them is not enough to explain the appearance of jewish communities in those western med areas which suspiciously overlap with the old Punic areas. Its also completely possible the connection is simply not there though. But then the question remains, where did these Punic Sicilian-Aegean people go to?

The Y-DNA results of these new Punic samples might shed an unequivocal light on answers to these questions.
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"Keep in mind that we have limited to no evidence, aDNA or archeological, of migration and settlement of Levantine Jews in the central and western med"

There are plenty of Jewish epigraphs, and Jewish terracotta lamps, all over the Roman world, what other evidence do you need?

"is not enough to explain the appearance of jewish communities in those western med areas which suspiciously overlap with the old Punic areas."

They don't overlap at all, the biggest Jewish community in antiquity was in Rome, whereas there were no Punic colonies in Central Italy, according to your logic, we should only see Jewish communities in North Africa, Southern Spain, Sardinia and Sicily but we see them all over the empire including Pannonia and Gaul.
Also in Sicily itself most finds of Jewish lamps are in Syracuse, in the Eastern side of the island, where Greek was spoken, and not in the Western side of the island where Punic communities lived.


"But then the question remains, where did these Punic Sicilian-Aegean people go to?"

Again, nowhere, I've already answered to that question. Where did Greeks go to in the Western Mediterranean? Nowhere, except for some extremely small pockets in South Italy, Greek eventally ceased to be spoken. Where did Etruscans go to? Nowhere, eventually they were Romanized.

"The Y-DNA results of these new Punic samples might shed an unequivocal light on answers to these questions."

Y DNA wise the results seem to be all over the place and don't seem to correspond specifically to Jewish Y DNA. Autosomal DNA wise the results are heterogenous too, looking at the models they use it's hard to see any pattern apart from Greek ancestry often showing up in many of them, but again their models are very questionable.
 
Tanit_reigns said:
And the DNA studies of Tarquinia showed two people there with Levantine ancestry, I forget the exact dates, but pre-imperial for sure
Click to expand...

These two are in fact the two samples that look most Levantine, both in uniparental markers (J1a and R2a) and autosomal DNA, R10337 is dated 150-3 BCE, 14C age (BP) is 70 BCE, the other, R10341, is dated 160-49 cal BCE, 14C age (BP) is 95 BCE. We cannot have an exact date but they are most likely from the 1st century BCE, i.e., during the final phase of Romanization of Tarquinia, which had been one of the most influential cities in Southern Etruria (Latium) and ends up under Romanization before the northernmost areas of Etruria. For obvious reasons, because Romanization is actually the expansion of Rome's political and cultural influence, which began with the defeat of Veio, the closest Etruscan city to Rome. 358 B.C. was the beginning year of a bitter war between Rome and Tarquinia that saw the latter exhausted and tried. As Rome expanded and Tarquinia suffered military defeats, the city gradually came to an end under Roman influence. Around 200 B.C. the Via Aurelia was built connecting Rome, and this period culminated in the granting of Roman citizenship, if memory serves, and the creation of the Municipium (90 B.C.). In fact these two Levantines are one of the weak points of the Moots paper, Tarquinia had always been the most cosmopolitan of the Etruscan world but these two Levantine individuals are most likely to be traced back more to Roman history and not to the relations between the Etruscan world and the Punic and Levantine worlds.

True, they are Pre-Imperial (27 B.C.) but we are talking about the phase immediately preceding, that is, the very last Republican phase, which is a transitional phase between the Republican and Imperial phases. In fact it is already Roman rather than Etruscan history for Tarquinia.

Jews in Rome are believed to have arrived from the second century B.C., if I remember correctly, but the two Levantines could be anything else. Interestingly, they were found in the same tomb along with R10339 and R10342 (both R1b, can't remember the deep clade), both dated 160-49 cal BCE, and have both a profile more northern-shifted than the Iron Age Etruscan cluster.

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kingdavid said:
here you were correct they are for sure bc
so they can be added to the Punic I22119 and the Hellenistic I10392 as one of the oldest cases of Levantine profile outside of the levant

roman republic Levantine outliers( r10337, r10341) from Tarquinia Tuscany
View attachment 18245

source:
www.nature.com

A genetic history of continuity and mobility in the Iron Age central Mediterranean - Nature Ecology & Evolution

The authors generate genomic data from 30 ancient human individuals, spanning the Bronze Age and the Iron Age from four archaeological sites in the Mediterranean (located in Tunisia, Sardinia and central Italy). Comparing with additional published ancient genomes, they generate insights into...
www.nature.com www.nature.com
Click to expand...

Tarquinia is in Lazio (Latium), not in Tuscany.
 
A response from, Lorenzo Nigro, one of the authors on the original paper - https://www.vicino-oriente-journal.it/index.php/vicinooriente/article/view/471

"The original title of the article when it was submitted was “Punic people had
cosmopolitan central Mediterranean ancestry with few genetic links to their eastern
Phoenician cultural forebears” and I accepted to contribute to. I think that the new title is
misleading.

But what, in fact, would the “ancient DNA of the Phoenicians” be against which to
compare the dataset defined primarily in the central-western Mediterranean? Available
evidence indicates that such a reference DNA – assuming it can even be defined as a
unified entity – was already itself mixed and heterogeneous during the properly Phoenician
age (ca. 1200-332 BC). Paleogenetic studies of the Levant clearly show that in the Iron
Age, significant external genetic inputs were absorbed by the coastal populations of the
Near East, for example from groups originating in Anatolia and southeastern Europe."
 
sulla_felix said:
A response from, Lorenzo Nigro, one of the authors on the original paper - https://www.vicino-oriente-journal.it/index.php/vicinooriente/article/view/471

"The original title of the article when it was submitted was “Punic people had
cosmopolitan central Mediterranean ancestry with few genetic links to their eastern
Phoenician cultural forebears” and I accepted to contribute to. I think that the new title is
misleading.

But what, in fact, would the “ancient DNA of the Phoenicians” be against which to
compare the dataset defined primarily in the central-western Mediterranean? Available
evidence indicates that such a reference DNA – assuming it can even be defined as a
unified entity – was already itself mixed and heterogeneous during the properly Phoenician
age (ca. 1200-332 BC). Paleogenetic studies of the Levant clearly show that in the Iron
Age, significant external genetic inputs were absorbed by the coastal populations of the
Near East, for example from groups originating in Anatolia and southeastern Europe."
Click to expand...
I agree with Nigro and I would add that the models they used are very debatable: Iran N to model people who died on average around 350 BC? It only makes sense to include it in models with only early Holocene components, like Iran N, Anatolia N, WHG, Natufian, etc. They should have only used samples from the Iron age onwards. In Sicily there were already publised samples from Polizzello and Montefalcone which they had, since they're included in this study, but they decided to use samples from 1500 BC instead. For Sardinia there are Iron Age samples from Sant'Imbenia and they're Nuragic-like so probably using Sardinia LBA doesn't make much difference in this case. They also could have tried to use samples from France, Mainland Italy or Northen Iberia instead of only using Steppe MLBA to model samples with additional steppe. After all they're using a refence sample from Bronze Age Southern Iberia with low steppe.
 
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just_a_simp said:
...
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This theory was popularized on the Unz Review a year ago. I tried to investigate every aspect thereof last year and left my research notes in >100 comments in the relevant comment thread (under the name of "Fuchs").
Summary:
- Genetics: Modern AJ and SJ have lower levels of K12 "Northwest Africa" ancestry (4.2% resp. 6.2%) than Iron Age Israel samples (7.23%). The Punics of the Roman era, on the other hand, were rich in that component
- Levant: In Hellenistic times, the Phoenicians spread out over the Greek Mediterranean world due to vast new business opportunities and consequently assimilated into those port cities’ respective populations
- Punics: once Carthage was gone, each Punic city was culturally absorbed into its own region, which meant that local elites – the people with the most Phoenician blood – would marry with local Mauretanian, Numidian, Sardinian, Hispanian elites, or with the newly-arrived Italians who were politically and culturally dominant. There was no force or motive present for Punic-Phoenician separatism under the new circumstances. Carthage had held these cities together, but now, the only city they all looked to was Rome. We have to keep in mind that identity was more local and less pan-ethnic in the ancient world and there never was a strong "Pan-Phoenician" identity to begin with, but rather particular city identities (of Tyre, Sidon etc, each with their own pantheons basically) similar to Greece (Athens VS Sparta, for example)
- Jews: Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC, but we find no significant Jewish presence in North Africa before around 70-130 AD. The Punics living in Neo-Carthage and elsewhere had had 220 years under Roman rule before Jews appear in significant numbers, so there's no reason why Jewish presence in former Carthaginian territories should be related to Punics rather than to Jewish immigrants from the East. Furthermore, the origins of the Jewish community in North Africa are not mysterious: "Titus settled 30,000 Jews in Carthage after his victory in Judaea [70AD]." [Rives, 1995, "Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine"]
- conversion: There's basically no evidence anywhere for Phoenicians/Punics (of any period) converting to Judaism. In 5th century BC Cyprus for example, it was the other way around and Jewish immigrants assimilated into local Phoenician culture. One thing to keep in mind is that the Phoenician/Punic religion was far more compatible with that of the Romans or Greeks than with that of the Jews, due to being Polytheistic
 
sulla_felix said:
...
But what, in fact, would the “ancient DNA of the Phoenicians” be against which to
compare the dataset defined primarily in the central-western Mediterranean? Available
evidence indicates that such a reference DNA – assuming it can even be defined as a
unified entity – was already itself mixed and heterogeneous during the properly Phoenician
age (ca. 1200-332 BC). Paleogenetic studies of the Levant clearly show that in the Iron
Age, significant external genetic inputs were absorbed by the coastal populations of the
Near East, for example from groups originating in Anatolia and southeastern Europe."
Click to expand...

They used samples from the Phoenician coast town of Akhziv as a reference. Supplementary info says:
- 2/16 of samples could be radiocarbon dated to 900 BCE-360 BC (the rest could not)
- "the individuals sampled from Akhziv ... were assumed to be Phoenician or Punic even if they were not directly dated because all
radiocarbon dates from those sites were consistent with a Phoenician or Punic context and strong archeological associations (see Archaeological Site Descriptions)"
- "The 13 individuals from Akhziv have relatively homogeneous ancestries and are genetically very similar to earlier populations in the Levant, as indicated by the PCA plot."

Why should that not be a valid reference for Tyrian or Sidonian starting populations for 9th century BC city foundations in the western med?

The external genetic inputs you've mentioned should mainly refer to Ashkelon IA samples, but that is not relevant to the question at hand because:
- Ashkelonians were Phillistines, not Phoenicians
- the four Ashkelon IA samples that have European admixture are dated ca. 1380–1130 BC (Iron I age), while the three younger (!) Ashkelon samples from around 1260-1040 (Iron IIa age) show only very diluted European ancestry and cluster close to earlier Levantines, which shows that the Phillistine newcomers were absorbed into the more numerous local population after a while (as you would expect!). See https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126...3-80b86c938873/assets/graphic/aax0061-f3.jpeg
(from this publication: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax0061)

- - - - -

Regarding Lorenzo Nigro's short's paper, I think Nigro is making several errors here, probably due to disliking the conclusions of the study.

"This limitation undermines the authors’ ability to trace the genetic impact of the initial Levantine settlers–who, by all historical and archaeological accounts, played a foundational role in the formation of Punic urban centres such as Carthage, Motya, Sulky, and Cádiz"
^
A city's founders don't have to be its majority population 200 years later. The Phoenicians were traders from a small coastal nation, they would have hired local workers and bodyguards. If the Phoenicians had been to Carthage what the patricians were to Rome, they would have never constituted more than a small minority. And like the Roman patricians, the Phoenicians would have been eclipsed by the lower classes over time and probably suffered from lower fertility, too.

"The article draws sweeping conclusions about the absence of Levantine genetic ancestry in the Punic world based on only 200 individuals across 14 sites. No demographic framework is provided for evaluating the representativeness of this dataset. Yet we know from archaeological and historical estimates that in each of these Punic centres, at least 200,000 individuals would have lived and died over the course of the centuries considered by the study.4Furthermore, across the Mediterranean, Punic populations likely numbered in the millions between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC"
^
- the sites in question were coastal towns and cities, whereas the majority of the population would have been rural and lived further inland
- in the 2022 presentation of this research, Ringbauer (?) mentioned that the tombs were of upper class individuals
It is precisely among the upper classes of coastal towns (that's three qualifiers!) that we would expect the greatest amount of Phoenician DNA - so if we don't find it there, there simply was (next to) none.

- - - - -

The "Gedrosia" component (K12) can help us find upper boundaries for Phoenician admixture in the western med. I think this is why the study authors included Iranian_N in their analysis, as that sort of ancestry would have been absent in Northwest Africa before the Iron Age.
8s1twv.jpg
 
Looking more closely at the graphs from the OP:

1. No half-Levantines:
What strikes me is that there's a broad gap between the 103 Phoenician/Punic samples from the western med and the most western-shifted Levantine samples (2/13 of the Akhziv samples). That's peculiar given the sheer number and diversity of the samples, and indicates that there were hardly any mixed individuals with around 50% Levantine heritage in the sample (as the paper's ancestry models confirm).

2. Looking at aforementioned Akhziv outliers:
- the most "left" one on the PCA graph is probably number 8 from Fig. 2 in the paper, which has a bit of Iberia/Sardinia BA-related ancestry
- the one to its bottom-right is probably one of the last three from Fig. 2 that have some Northafrican ancestry
This is relevant because it shows that the "real" Phoenicians were hardly western-shifted at the beginning of their expansion, meaning that we can't argue that they were already half-Central Mediterranean in genetic profile anyway. Instead, there was some back-immigration from the western med into Phoenicia proper (which is very realistic), shifting a few Phoenicians westward.

3. A few less-than-quarter-Levatines:
Furthermore, the bulk of the Phoenician/Punic samples that have little Northafrican heritage lies between Sicily Polizello IA (native Sicilian site ca. 650 BC) and the Mycenaean Greek cluster, though a dozen or so of them lie a bit closer to the Levant than the Mycenaeans. Does this mean that these individuals had, say, 20% Levantine heritage or so?
- Fig 2. shows that 3/26 of the Kerkouane samples (900-360 BC) with 10-20% Levant BA ancestry (rest Northafrica IA), while the other 23/26 were modelled as mainly Greek/Sicily BA mixed with varying levels of Northafrica IA and a bit from other components. 3/26 is 11,5%, meaning that total Levantine contributions can be estimated at ca. 2% for the Kerkouane population.
- 1/7 of the Iberan Villaricos samples shows the same profile (10% Levantine + 90% Northafrican IA) -> ca. 1.4% in Villaricos

4. The above is no modelling artifact:
"As individuals typically had several valid admixture models, we selected the model that maximized Sicilian–Aegean or Levantine ancestry (Methods) ... The complete set of valid models for all 140 individuals in the dataset (including those with fewer than 100,000 SNPs) is specified in Extended Data Fig. 3."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08913-3/figures/8 shows multiple admixture models for most individuals, but:
- the only Kerkouane individuals that showed some Levantine ancestry under any model were the three aforementioned ones - and each had at least 1 other valid model (!) without Levantine contribution
- for Carthage, there's only a low-coverage individual that could be modelled with Levantine ancestry (though there's a totally different model as well)
- for Sardinia, there are 5/25 low-coverage individuals that could be modelled in wildly different ways, but only 1/18 out of the high(er) coverage individuals (with a valid model) shows a Levantine profile (that's the only basically "full" Levantine in the 128-strong Phoenician-Punic dataset). That would mean a ca. 5% overall Levantine contribution to the local population (assuming the samples are representative of course)
- for Sicily, there's 1/32 low-coverage case, and 2/31 samples that are clearly Levantine, but no other model for any other samples featuring Levantine heritage. Note that these 2 are from post-Punic times though, so in effect none of the 25 Sicilian samples from the pre-Roman era show discernable Levantine ancestry under any model!
- for the Iberan set, there's again 3 low-coverage individuals with the same issue (can be modelled any way, basically), and 1 high(er) coverage sample that can be modelled 10% Levantine + 90% Northafrican IA - but also in 3 other ways that don't involve any Levantine ancestry.

5. Conclusion:
- the overall Levantine ancestry in the whole valid Phoenician-Punic set of 103 would have been around 1.4%, or possibly less
- we have 1/103 basically full Levantine, no half-Levantines, no quarter-Levantines and 4/103 samples that likely had 10-20% Levantine ancestry. This means that there was probably no widespread, thoroughly mixed-in 10% Levantine heritage below the detection threshold. In other words, the Phoenicians were not a demographically significant minority that disappeared by mixing into the coastal population - they were simply never present in numbers sufficient to affect the latter's genetic composition!
 
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Low Levantine genetic contribution to Punic colonies can (probably) be explained:

Let's start by looking at the main PCA graph again: https://www.eupedia.com/forum/attachments/1745426611014-png.18186/
The 103 Phoenician-Punic individuals from the western med fall mainly into three categories:
- 18/103 “NW” cluster (Iberans, Central Europeans, IA Sicilians or inbetween those three)
- 1/103 Levantine
- 71/103 in a stretched “triangle” between IA Sicily, Mycenaeans and NW Africa (excluding the 8 that cluster right with IA Sicilians)
- 2 outliers of the triangle, one towards Sardinia BA and one towards Egypt or the southern Levant
- 11/103 right outside the triangle because a bit more eastern-shifted than Mycenaeans

I think the 11/103 set probably reflects ancestry from Crete, the Eastern Aegean, the southern coast of Anatolia or Cyprus, which begs the question to which extent the less NW African half of the 71/103 samples in the triangle had that sort of ancestry, too.

Proposed solution:
Phoenician trade was a multi-ethnic endevour from the start, whereby Levantine traders and ship captains would hire Cyprians and people from the wider Aegean region (Greece, Crete, Rhodes, West and Southwest Turkish coast) as workers, oarsmen, craftsmen and bodyguards (or use slaves from these regions for those purposes). Hence, the colony-founding population that arrived by ship in the western med was already mostly non-Levantine.
A merely 2% Levantine contribution to Punic coast towns could hence be explained by the movement of a 10% Levantine, 90% Aegean+Cyprian population west, a roughly 1:1 mixing with Native coast-dwellers in Tunisia that were genetically close to contemporary Sicilians in the first stage, and a gradual mixing with Native NW Africans and, to a lesser degree, immigrant Sicilians and Aegeans over the following centuries. That’s how we can get to a coastal population that is genetically ca. 2% Levantine and about a third Sicilian, Aegean and NW African respectively.

Note that the Aegean+Cyprian set would have been culturally mostly Phoenicianized, which would have explained the clearly Phoenician archaeological findings from those sites (and the impression the Romans got).

This scenario makes more sense than a largely Phoenician immigrant population because:
- it’s 2,300 km from Tyre to Carthage as the crow flies and 3,300 km along the coastal route. Not easy to move a lot of goods or people over such distances in the early Iron age!
- Phoenicia as a whole probably only had a tenth of the population of the wider Aegean region (can be roughly estimated based on area of cultivated land and Roman-era population figures)
- Cyprians and Aegeans would have probably constituted a more available labor pool than inland Levantines, because:
a) they were used to taking to the seas while inland populations were not
b) the Phoenicians were trading with their homelands, and Phoenician western med trade developed as an extension of (or in conjunction with) their trade with the wider Aegean region. Phoenician traders would not have sailed directly, but undertaken a trade journey through a dozen or more port towns, always selling and buying, and often enough hiring and firing workers as well. Hence, the closer geographic proximity of Cyprus and the Aegean regions to the final destination in the western med would have made a real difference regarding the kind of people you would have had on board (we may further speculate that Levantine workers would have probably preferred not to settle farther than Greece)
 
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