And in its ending, it set the conditions for the world that came after — the world in which the Greeks would develop democracy, in which the Phoenicians would spread the alphabet around the Mediterranean, in which monotheistic religion would emerge in Canaan, in which the great empires of the Iron Age would develop.

The Sea Peoples were one thread in this transformation.

They were refugees, raiders, migrants, settlers, warriors, and farmers.

They were neither the simple destroyers of the old world nor simple victims of its collapse.

They were people navigating an unprecedented crisis, using the tools available to them — ships, weapons, family networks, cultural resilience — to survive in a world that was falling apart.

And three thousand years later, science is finally able to say something meaningful about who they were — where their ancestors came from, what genetic heritage they brought with them, and what traces they left in the populations that came after.