Friday, July 05, 2019

The Philistines were Europeans?

GENETIC ANALYSIS: ARCHAEOLOGY SHOWS PHILISTINES, ENEMY OF ISRAELITES, CAME FROM EUROPE. "We found infants that were too young to travel... so they were born on site. And their DNA revealed [that] their parents’ heritage was not from the local population" (Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman, Jerusalem Post).
“When we found the infants – infants that were too young to travel... these infants couldn’t march or sail to get to the land around Ashkelon, so they were born on site. And their DNA revealed [that] their parents’ heritage was not from the local population,” Aja explained, referring to the new genetic input from the direction of Southern Europe that was found in bone samples taken from infants buried under the floors of Philistine homes, as was the custom during that period.
More on the Ashkelon cemetery is here.

For various reasons, some scholars have argued that the Philistines had an Aegean origin. These new results seem to be compatible with that hypothesis.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.