The Sea Peoples: The Ancient Mystery That Stumped Historians For Centuries — And What Modern Science Finally Revealed About Who They Really Were

Greek colonization added another layer.

Beginning in the eighth century BCE, Greek cities established colonies across the Mediterranean — in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, southern France, the Black Sea coast, and the Levant.

This Greek colonization introduced Aegean genetic ancestry into many of the same regions where the Sea Peoples had moved centuries earlier.

By the time of the Hellenistic period (after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late fourth century BCE), the genetic landscape of the Mediterranean had been thoroughly remixed by centuries of migration, colonization, military conquest, and commercial contact.

The specific genetic contributions of the Sea Peoples were diluted and distributed in ways that can be partially traced by comparing ancient genomic sequences but cannot be definitively partitioned from the contributions of later migrations.