The Egyptians repulsed them.

Some settled along the Levantine coast and became the Philistines.

Others settled in Cyprus, in Sardinia, in Sicily, in the western Mediterranean.

Still others were absorbed into the populations around them without leaving a clearly identifiable cultural or genetic trace.

The modern science — the ancient DNA extracted from burial sites, the paleoclimatic reconstructions from sediment cores, the expanding archaeological datasets from across the region — has clarified some of these stories while leaving others still uncertain.

The Philistines, we now know, had significant Aegean genetic ancestry, confirming what the archaeology had long suggested.