An international team of genetic experts examined the ancient dna extracted from 93 individuals. all these people died over 1500 years at five different sites in the middle east. all of them were part of the canaanite civilization, which thrived for some 4700 years up until around 1200 bce. however, what surprises the scientists is the length they can now make between these ancient biblical people and their modern-day descendants. geneticists have found traces of biblical figures hidden in the dna of modern populations. the canaanites lived in the lands that lie between modern egypt in historic mesopotamia, which stretched in an arc from the persian gulf to the mediterranean, mesopotamia covered parts of the modern southwest asian countries of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Kuwait. the canaanites lived in what today is now Israel, as well as in parts of modern Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
In the Bible, the Book of Genesis states that the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth. And ham is the father of Canaan. The descendants of Canaan according to the biblical account are the people that came to be called the Canaanites. And in a famous passage, the book of Exodus describes a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites. The results of this study of Canaanite genetics were announced in May 2020, and it's the largest of its kind undertaken in the Middle East to date. It's an incredible technical achievement that DNA can now be extracted from such ancient bones. However, what is equally astonishing is what the scientists were able to identify about how Canaanite DNA lives on in a group of people who walk the earth today, before we get into the detail of the connections revealed by the experts between ancient and modern people, let's learn a little more about the Canaanites. untangling the precise origins of these ancient people is a tricky business.
