Particularly important are the continued excavations at sites associated with the Philistines — Ashkelon, Gath, Ekron, and others — which continue to yield material that refines our understanding of Philistine culture and origins.

Ancient DNA research in the Bronze Age Mediterranean is expanding rapidly.

As the costs of ancient genome sequencing decline and the methods for extracting DNA from ancient remains improve, more and more ancient individuals from more and more sites become candidates for analysis.

Within the next decade, it is reasonable to expect substantially more ancient genomic data from Cyprus, from western Anatolia, from Crete, and from other regions directly relevant to the Sea Peoples question.

The growing ancient DNA dataset from the Bronze Age Mediterranean will allow researchers to ask increasingly specific questions: Where precisely in the Aegean did the Philistines’ ancestors come from?