In First, Archaeologists Extract DNA of Ancient Israelites
A rare First Temple-period family burial opens the door to genetic studies on the true origin of the ancient Israelites – and their links to modern Jewish populations
So far the collaboration of archaeologists and geneticists has been able to extract genetic material from two individuals, producing partial information, which is a tiny sample indeed. But it promises to pave the way for further research on longstanding questions about the origins of the ancient Israelites, their links to earlier populations living in the Levant, as well as to modern-day Jewish people.
Preliminary results from the excavation and the DNA study were expected to be presented at a conference about new archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem and its environs on Wednesday, and Haaretz has obtained an advance copy of the researchers’ paper. The conference has since been delayed due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza.
This story begins in 2018, when the Theft Prevention Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority discovered a tomb in the village of Abu Ghosh, which is right next to the biblical settlement of Kiryat Yearim, some 15 kilometers west of Jerusalem.
The tomb had been badly damaged, first by construction and then by looting, so the archaeologists conducted a hurried salvage excavation. Although only a fraction of the tomb had survived, the researchers uncovered some 150 pottery vessels, including bowls, jars and lamps, as well as the jumbled skeletal remains of at least 10 individuals, the archaeologists report.
Those interred in the tomb included six adults, three men and three women, and four children, including two babies, one infant, and an adolescent. This is consistent with the high mortality rate of children in ancient times, the researchers note.
Based on the pottery typology used in the funerary offerings it seems that the tomb was used for a prolonged period, around 750-650 B.C.E., placing it in the late Iron Age, or late First Temple period according to the biblical chronology.
The tomb is an important find in its own right, given that burials from this period are rare and tend to be from slightly later times, generally closer to the fall of Jerusalem and the First Temple to the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., says Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa. Finkelstein was called in to lead the research on the tomb as he was already heading a dig at Kiryat Yearim, a settlement which is mentioned in the Bible as having housed the Ark of the Covenant before it was brought to Jerusalem.
“I suppose that we are dealing with a family tomb, likely from the elite of Kiryat Yearim, whose members were buried there over a long period of time,” Finkelstein says. “We don’t know how big it was originally, because most of it was destroyed in recent years.”
Together with Prof. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, and mathematician Dr. Arie Shaus, Finkelstein embarked on a quest to extract DNA from the people interred in the Kiryat Yearim tomb.
Who is an ancient Jew?
The technique of extracting genetic material from ancient bones, teeth and other organic remains began to emerge over 20 years ago, and has since reached such sophistication that researchers are even divining (some) information on creatures that lived over a million years ago. It is rare for bones to be preserved well enough to provide any genetic material at all, yet the ability to extract and sequence genetic material from ancient remains has given researchers major insights into the origins, migrations and history of human populations, as well as prehistoric hominins, animals and plants.
But big questions remain when it comes to the genetic history of the Jewish people. Looking far into the past, inquisitive minds have long asked: Who were the ancient Hebrews, the inhabitants of the biblical Kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the Iron Age (12th-6th century B.C.E)? From which population did they descend and how were they connected to their neighbors, the Philistines, Edomites, Moabites and so on?
Looking at the present, we wonder what is the genetic link between First Temple-period Israelites and today’s Jews, and which other populations intermingled with them over millennia of exile, wanderings and persecutions. And then there is the big mystery surrounding the origin of modern Jewish groups, particularly of Europe’s Ashkenazi population, whose communities first emerged in the Rhineland at the height of the Middle Ages. What is their ancestral connection to the Israelites of yore?
By the way, these questions exist independently of the political conflict over competing claims to the Holy Land, although these issues are often coopted and distorted in the toxic debate over which modern population has the greatest link to the ancestral inhabitants of the Levant.
A bona fide Israelite bone
Over the years, scientists have found some indirect evidence pertaining to the genetic origins of the Israelites – more about this later – by looking at the DNA of modern Jews as well as Bronze Age Canaanites, who preceded the formation of the ancient Israelite identity. But direct access to ancient Israelite DNA and all the information contained therein has so far eluded researchers.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, well-preserved DNA is harder to find in the hot Middle Eastern climes. But this technical issue was partly overcome by the 2015 discovery that the petrous bone, a part of the skull located behind the ear, contains a much higher concentration of DNA than other bones, meaning that at least some genetic material may survive in it even in warmer weather.
That game-changing revelation allowed scientists to shed light on everything from the genetic history of the earliest Neolithic farmers in Anatolia to the origins of the Philistines, the biblical enemies of the Israelites. But not much headway had been made on the ancient Hebrews.
That has been partly because of the rarity of ancient Hebrew graves and largely because in Judaism, excavating or disturbing graves is a big taboo. Particularly in Israel, human remains are not considered antiquities by law, and archaeologists who find ancient graves are often pressured by ultra-Orthodox groups to quickly rebury any bones they unearth.
At Kiryat Yearim, it was indeed the precious petrous bone that yielded genetic information about two of the individuals buried there, the researchers report. But before we look at the – very preliminary – results we have wonder whether we can be sure about the cultural identity of the tomb’s residents.
It’s true that no ancient Hebrew inscriptions were found in the burial confirming that the deceased were Israelites. However, the pottery assemblage is typical of what is found in late First Temple-period burials in Jerusalem, Finkelstein explains. Together with Kiryat Yearim’s proximity to what was then the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, this suggests that the locals can indeed be identified as ancient Hebrews, he says.
“Of course, cultural identity and genetic background are not the same,” Finkelstein adds. “Genetic background can be revealed by an ancient DNA study. Identity is about culture, geography and can change through the ages. This is also true in the present: just look at the population of modern Israel.”
There is also a question as to whether Kiryat Yearim was controlled by Judah or its larger, and often rival, northern neighbor, the Kingdom of Israel. Finkelstein’s recent excavations at the site have revealed a large artificial platform at the top of the settlement, which is typical of the northern kingdom’s urban planning. This suggests that Kiryat Yearim was initially under the control of Israel, at least until that kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in the second half of the eighth century B.C.E.
In any case, the genetic data from Kiryat Yearim offers a first glimpse of how directly sampling remains from the First Temple period can shed light on the history of the ancient Hebrews, Israelite or Judahite.
The two sampled individuals were one male and one female. The conference paper only discusses data from the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, sections of the genome that are inherited only from the father and mother respectively. Data gleaned from the rest of the genome will be provided in an upcoming scientific publication.
“This is only partial data with a more detailed paper coming in the future,” Reich says. “Sampling DNA from ancient Israelites is exciting, as it should make it possible to test how they relate genetically to previous groups, to contemporary non-Israelite groups, and to people living today.
And the Canaanites begat Abraham
The highlight of the very partial results is that the Y chromosome in the man belongs to the J2 haplogroup, a group of closely-related DNA sequences that is believed to have originated in the Caucasus or Eastern Anatolia, a vast area including modern-day eastern Turkey, northwest Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and southern Russia.
This is important because, as mentioned, researchers have already mapped the DNA of ancient Canaanites, showing that they had a strong ancestral connection to modern-day Jewish and Arab populations. That research, published in Cell in 2020, also showed that the Canaanites in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (before the emergence of the Israelite identity) descended from a mix of Neolithic inhabitants of the Levant and a group that immigrated from the Caucasus or Eastern Anatolia.
This migration was already in motion in the Early Bronze Age, around 2900-2500 B.C.E., and is also visible archaeologically, with pottery from this period exhibiting strong influences from Anatolia and the Caucasus. It continued in the Middle Bronze Age, as seen in the study of ancient DNA of individuals from Megiddo and other places, and is evident in the mention in historical texts of Canaanite officials in the Late Bronze Age, with names that are not Semitic and originate in the northeastern Middle East, Finkelstein says.
While it’s too early to draw conclusions based on limited data from a single Israelite sample, it is of note that the First Temple-period individual from Kiryat Yearim still carried the same genetic variations that the Canaanites displayed centuries earlier and which they in turn had inherited from the Caucasian newcomers.
“As limited as it is, we cannot ignore this piece of evidence, that there is a connection between the genetic background of this person at Kiryat Yearim in the first millennium B.C.E. and the Canaanites in the second millennium B.C.E.,” Finkelstein says. “It’s not a complete surprise because we have evidence from other lines of inquiry, but it is another, small piece of evidence showing that the genetic pool is the same. Of course, at this time we cannot say if this is representative of the entire population.”
If researchers gather more data confirming that most Israelites indeed shared this ancestry with the Canaanites, it would support something that experts have strongly suspected for a while, that in fact the ancient Hebrews descended from the Canaanites.
The biblical stories stress a discontinuity between the Canaanites, often depicted in a negative light, and the pious Israelites, described as non-local descendants of a Mesopotamian-born patriarch, Abraham.
Out of Anatolia
Yet archaeologists have long noted that the similarities between Canaanite and Israelite material culture, language and settlement patterns all suggest that the latter simply grew out of the former.
“In the last 30-40 years there is a general understanding that the Hebrews were mostly of local origin, which means they were Canaanites and became Israelites in an identity-forming process that probably took a long time,” Finkelstein says.
This process started at the end of the Bronze Age, around the 12th century B.C.E., when the so-called Bronze Age Collapse saw the destruction of multiple civilizations across the Mediterranean and the withdrawal of Egypt from Canaan, which the pharaohs had controlled for centuries. In the ensuing power vacuum, the local Canaanites formed new cultural identities around the emerging territorial entities we are familiar with from the Bible: Moab, Edom, Aram, Ammon and of course Judah and Israel (the partial exception here being the Philistines who do appear to have received an influx of Aegean migrants).
As for the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the maternal side, the two individuals at Kiryat Yearim displayed two different haplogroups. One, T1a, is a very ancient ancestral haplogroup, with similar counterparts already found in individuals living in Jordan some 10,000 years ago and in southeastern Europe around 7,000 years ago, says Shaus. In later samples it is found in Iran and in those Canaanites sampled in Israel, as well as all the way to the Baltic and Ural Mountains.
This suggests that this haplogroup’s initial source may have been somewhere in Neolithic Anatolia or the Levant, and slowly spread with early farming, Shaus says.
The second mitochondrial haplogroup, called H87, hasn’t been previously detected in ancient DNA samples but is found in modern-day Basques, Tunisian Arabs, and Iraqis. This may point to an origin in the Mediterranean or the Near East, perhaps in the Arabian peninsula, he says. If so, this particular haplogroup may have spread with nomadic populations, Shaus concludes. In other words, the samples from two ancient Israelites hint at ancestry from peoples in both Anatolia and Arabia.
Much more data and research are needed to understand how significative these results are, whether they truly represent the ancestry of the region’s population at the time – and what they mean for our understanding of the broader story of the emergence of ancient Israel.