For that, genetic evidence is required.

The DNA Revolution And The Ancient Near East

Ancient DNA research has transformed multiple fields of archaeology and human prehistory over the past decade, and the Bronze Age is no exception.

The ability to extract, sequence, and compare the genomic material from ancient human remains has opened questions that traditional archaeology simply could not address.

For the Sea Peoples question, the critical ancient DNA evidence came from two sets of research published between 2019 and the early 2020s: work on ancient Philistine individuals from the excavations at Ashkelon, and broader work on the population genetics of the Bronze Age Levant and Aegean.

The Ashkelon study, published in 2019 in the journal Science Advances by Harney et al., analyzed the genomes of ten individuals from Ashkelon across three time periods: a Middle Bronze Age individual from before the Philistine period (approximately 1750-1600 BCE), four individuals from the early Iron Age Philistine period (approximately 1200-1000 BCE), and five individuals from a later Iron Age period (approximately 1000-800 BCE).