But the ox-carts filled with women and children tell a different story — one of families on the move, of communities displaced from the only world they had known, of people doing what people have always done when their world falls apart: finding somewhere else to go.

That is the deeper mystery of the Sea Peoples — not simply the question of where they came from, but what it means to understand them as human beings rather than as a historical problem to be solved.

The DNA tells us they had Aegean roots.

The archaeology tells us they made Aegean-style pottery and had Aegean-style foodways.

The Egyptian records tell us they fought with distinctive weapons and wore distinctive headgear and brought their families with them.

What the records cannot tell us is what they thought about the world they had left, or the world they were trying to enter, or the world that was collapsing around them on all sides.