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.”
To get back to the early 17th century, you would have to go back at least three more generations or 1/1024th.
We've had a few other recent topics about ancient DNA, sample links from the helixmakemineadouble keyword:
Great-great-great-great-grandparents, down to you. Most people have 23 chromosome pairs, which means that at least 18 of the gggg-gr generation didn't pass any of their genome to you, assuming there are no duplicates for that generations (because of criss-crossing lines of descent). The cell over the middle 46 is just an illustration, not to show which ones were and were not, since there's (probably, usually) no way to know exactly, short of the unlikely event of having genetic samples from all of one's gr-gr-gr-gr-grandparents.
I just assigned the numbers arbitrarily, as this is a simple model version, and it doesn't take into account, uh, recursive branching (my parents have common ancestors, but none of that fell down through the pinball machine of my genome). Obviously there's no way to have an even break between sides of the family, apart from one's own parents, due to the 23 chromosome pairs. There has been at least one nitwit who claimed that everyone was exactly one quarter of each of their grandparents -- apparently in Nitwitland, the chromosomes play go-fish to make sure it happens, and does this on purpose before each of us is conceived.
| 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 5 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 | 5 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 9 | 6 | 6 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10 | 13 | 11 | 12 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 23 | 23 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 46 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Across cultures and time it always seems to come down to good vs evil.
My DNA and the documentation is coming from Ancestry.com.
Our grandson who is very good in math and is basically, as he calls himself a white guy went over the math, when he visited for a weekend this spring. His knowledge of these ratios/%’s came from a math class in an excellent private school.
First, he used my new report showing African DNA showing up in my profile of 3% as an example, from my Dad’s side. The African DNA does not show up on any living relatives on my Mothers side.
The math from our Grandson: My Dad would have had 6%, his Dad 12%, that guy’s Dad would have been 24% (all rounded off). That would had my Dad’s African DNA line back to a generation or so before the civil war about 10-24% without some interlopers tossing in their DNA.
My siblings, who have had DNA testing, show basically the same % as mine, and their children/grand kids are showing 1-2% African DNA. Their tests are in that % ball park. So the undocumented African DNA comes from my Dad’s family.
Then, the ‘mystery’ comes into play. On my mothers side’s a lot of supposedly Ancestry documented Cherokees and other tribes,?. These documentations appear in the 1700 to 1800’s in the Ancestry Files. These “Indians” married our Uk/Scottish/Irish ancestors from the mid 1700 to mid the 1800s.
Yet, zero Indian DNA shows up in my tests, my siblings and their adult children and kids.
On Ancestry, we have identified 100’s of first to 4th generation cousins, on my mother’s side, who have had DNA testing by Ancestry with that family line. None of them show any Indian DNA.
Ancestry has had a big increase in the numbers of people purchasing the DNA tests in recent months. They have put some of us on various Beta programs to test and report back to them.
I have been on an Ancestry Beta DNA reporting testing system for over a month. I have been averaging 4-8 new cousins per day.
This Beta testing allows me to check on their DNA to see where their ancestors came from. No names re ancestors just the % of their estimated DNA’s & where those DNA’s came from. For example the African DNA has run from 1% to 24% in some of these new cousins on my Dad’s side of the DNA families and zero American Indian blood on either my Dad’s side or my mother’s side.
Their new programs have some very powerful tools to identify DNA and not identities unless the users allow it.
This is the part that gets really confusing.
DNA traces blood lines; documentation who lives together. The Hemmings family, because of their blood relationship with the Jefferson family, had the option of selectively misplacing (or even altering) documentation so they could pass as white, an avenue many of them chose.
Now that it is no longer fashionable to be white, they can use their DNA testing to highlight their African roots. The Hemmings are just one famous example.
Pure speculation on my part, but 18th century Indians, especially in Pennsylvania (but I would assume among the Cherokee as well), were subjected to a severe reduction of their ranks, not only due to contacts with disease to which they had no immunity (especially smallpox) but internal resource conflicts with competing tribes as they were pushed west into every shrinking territory.
Incorporation of enemy captives, including white settlers, into their tribes was a part of the culture. After a generation or so, these captives would lose their former identity completely and become a member of the tribe. This was not a rare happening, it was quite normal. Indeed, some tribes on the frontier (from both the Indian and the white perspective) were majority captive.
Indeed, Ben Franklin observed that captives steeped in Indian culture, once they made the conversion, could not be cajoled back into white culture because the material benefits of doing so was zero to small whereas the loss of freedom was too great.
So your documentation may be true, but no DNA markers because former captives married former captives. Rare for sure, but not impossible.
There are mutations, which are not often; there's a bunch of the base pairs which apparently do nothing but continue to get passed down. As gametes are built, recombination occurs, but not on every chromosome, as it is a random process, resulting in a slight shuffle of the mostly inert base pairs, but the net effect is not a perfect 25% of each grandparent -- in fact, it *could* result in one grandparent being completely 'dealt out'. Overall there are about 6 million variants in the human genomes of two unrelated parents, but it sez here, "Males average about 27 crossovers per child and females average about 41 crossovers per child."
My wife says I still don’t understand sex, but according to her this chromosome mixing is why none of the kids look like me.
Sounds like you're doing everything right, regardless. I had a relative handful of pretty close DNA relatives, and not one of them were even remotely familiar, and where I could check, not even one family tree hooked in to mine. And the best part was, not one of them returned my pvt msg.
BOL!
Sure blame it on your chromosome mixture.
Your DNA is to be blamed, not you! :)
I have close to a dozen “new” relatives that have gotten back to me.
Including one yesterday. We have a clan going back centuries with some interesting history re the British King for a Day and his Cardinal.
Also, one helped to correct some bad oral history. Her Mother didn’t die in the 1918 flu epidemic with her father, an uncle of mine. She lived another 50+ years. Her niece, my new second cousin thought that we had died.
“Across cultures and time it always seems to come down to good vs evil.”
One of my ancestors was burned at stake and his daughter was forced to start the fire.
We saw that part last night on Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall Season 1, Episode 1. They didn’t show his daughter starting the fire.
His crime was telling the King, who was working up to a new Queen for a day that his new wife was not who they claimed. He refused to bow and accept her. Instead, he repudiated her claims.
Probably a lot of what you posted is/was true.
The math on our father’s side is fairly straight forward.
Apparently, if the DNA is on our mother’s side, the rules change and ancestors often don’t show.
Like Garth Tater, my logical mind can’t handle this DNA stuff when our female ancestors were involved.
Okay, "the British King for a Day and his Cardinal", I'm stumped. :^)
“I could check, not even one family tree hooked in to mine. And the best part was, not one of them returned my pvt msg.”
For over a month, I have been beta testing some new stuff on Ancestry.com
Even if new people didn’t show their name, and they had paid for a DNA test.
Ancestry would post the following re their DNA results and ping me if they appeared to be related:
Trees, Ethnicity, Shared Matches
I could check, on the above, even if their family tree was quote private or not listed.
Also if they blocked everything about them and used a relative’s tree which was open and approved by the relative or descendant, I could access that tree and gather a lot of DNA data/names.
I private mailed them with a link to my tree re our possible ancestors.
A good % got back to me and were very positive and thankful.
Most never got back to me, and one reported me as abusing the system. She had nothing but private on her profile and tree. Yet, she was part of a fairly large family that had no restrictions on accessing their tree. I accessed that family tree from a suggestion by Ancestry. We had several possible relatives, and I sent her a private email with those possibilities. She apparently flipped out.
A profession genealogist didn’t like a similar situation with a paying customer.
Which British King killed and divorced queens after they didn’t have sons?
How many wives did King Henry the 8th kill?
King Henry VIII, To six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, Two divorced, two beheaded.
Who was King Henry VIII’s cardinal?
March 1473 – 29 November 1530), was an English archbishop, statesman and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. When Henry VIII became King of England in 1509, Wolsey became the King’s almoner. ... His appointment as a cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515 gave him precedence over all other English clergy.
Thomas Wolsey - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolsey
In the good old days, genealogists online were a bright spot on an otherwise crappy www. Too many of those have passed away, some who are around are privacy obsessed.
Hank was king for longer than one day, so that threw me off.
My auto correct went from Queen for A Day to King for a day.
My 80 year old mind and eyes didn’t catch that.
Hank the VIII!
Has a nice ring, unless he was having you burnt to death or having your throat cut.
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