> “At each site, people were highly variable in their ancestry, with the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary people of Sicily and the Aegean, and many people with significant North African associated ancestry as well.”
They say "cultural exchange" but is this a euphemism that includes things like warfare and slavery? Like the way Alexander the Great spread Greek culture?
It seems like the main hypothesis they're ruling out is migration.
We did hear about it. They did build an empire on Sicily. Sicily was a major territory of Carthage.
This is from over 2500 years ago. How amazing is that, that we have this capacity in DNA analysis now to discover details like this from so long ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
I think you're right that the Phoenicians deserve more credit, as does Carthage. There is yet hope more of their history may come to light. We're unlikely to uncover records on the organic media the Phoenician alphabet was tailored for, but Mesopotamian cultures were contemporaries of the Phoenicians and we're discovering/translating new cuneiform tablets all the time. Entire Mesopotamian cities remain to be discovered, and some significant ones that we know of are likely buried beneath modern settlements.
We may never get the Phonecian's story from their own perspective, but we may yet get a better picture of them from people who didn't have a vested interest in erasing their history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit
This is mostly a matter of excavating the tells we can see with our eyes. The history is easy to discover, but there's very little interest, so it doesn't get done.
Note that the initial wave of archaeology in Mesopotamia was fueled by popular interest in the Bible. That sputtered out when archaeology turned out not to support most of what the Bible said. So now there isn't interest from people who'd like to see the Bible confirmed, and there also isn't interest from the general public who have no particular connection to the region.
Personally at least i find the cultural context the bible sprouted up in to be really interesting.
I don't think we owe the survival of Greek sources to the Romans exclusively. Had Rome been destroyed and wiped out, we wouldn't have Latin texts, but the Hellenistic kingdoms could have carried on and Greek would have remained a prestige language in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Have you perhaps heard of anime? Or seen how widespread men's suits are? Or looked up how much images of Jesus and Mary (the ones from the Christian religion) vary across the world?