The research on Italian Bronze Age and early Iron Age populations — including the Etruscans — continues to add nuance to the discussion of western Mediterranean connections to the Sea Peoples phenomenon.

What We Now Know: A Summary

Drawing together the evidence from archaeology, textual sources, and ancient DNA research, what can we say with confidence about the Sea Peoples?

First, they were real.

The Sea Peoples were not a mythological construction or an Egyptian exaggeration.

They were real groups of people who moved through the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age Collapse and who left both material and genetic traces of their presence.

Second, the Philistines — one of the main Sea Peoples groups — had significant genetic ancestry from the Aegean region.