The Punic People Were Mostly Greek, Not Levantine, In Ancestry

Ancient DNA from the Iron Age and classical Greco-Roman era reveals that the Punic people were much closer genetically to the Greeks and modern Sicilians than to the Phoenicians of the Levant who founded this maritime empire in the Western Mediterranean.

Punic people from this time period had been expected to be genetically similar to the Phoenicians were had often been assumed to be the ancestors of the Punic people, since archaeological and historical information indicated that the Phoenicians founded Carthage and other Punic cities. Linguistic information had also supported this expectation:

The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and north western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.

To the extent that the Punic people were genetically different from the Greeks, this was predominantly due to Iberian and Northwest African admixture, rather than due to Levantine admixture. 

Levantine admixture was completely absent from the Punic sample, except in three individuals (about 5% of the Punic sample analysed with Admixture) who were predominantly Levantine, and another four individuals who were predominantly North African in ancestry with very minor Levantine admixture (but with no Greek, Iberian, or other kinds of ancestry). 

This suggests a narrative in which a 95% Greek-like Punic people may have mostly replaced (without meaningful admixing with) a society in which some people with nearly purely Levantine Phoenicians, and some people were assimilated indigenous Northwest Africans with minor Phoenician ancestry.

Likewise, none of the contemporaneous ancient DNA from the Levant showed any Greek admixture at all, although three of eleven samples had small amounts of North African ancestry, and a fourth had small amounts of Iranian and Iberian ancestry (but no North African admixture).

The paper is Harald Ringbauer, et al., "Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors" Nature (April 2025).

As Bernard explains at his blog (via Google translate from French):

Phoenician culture emerged in Bronze Age city-states in the Levant. By the early first millennium BCE, the Phoenicians had established an extensive trade network along the Mediterranean coast as far south as the southwest shores of the Iberian Peninsula, spreading their culture, religion, and language. 

By the mid-sixth century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician colony in present-day Tunisia, emerged as a major center of power in the central and western Mediterranean, as Levantine influence declined as their cities fell under the control of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Carthage subsequently came into conflict with Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and then with the Roman Empire in the third and second centuries BCE, before its final destruction in 146 BCE. 

In this article, the term Punic is given to all archaeological sites in the central and western Mediterranean associated with Phoenician culture, dated between the sixth and second centuries BCE, corresponding to the hegemony of Carthage in the region.

They analyzed the genomes of 210 ancient individuals from 14 Phoenician or Punic archaeological sites located in the Iberian Peninsula, Sardinia, Sicily, North Africa and the Levant dated between 600 and 150 BCE. There are no individuals older than 600 BCE, because before this date cremation was the most common burial method in these communities.

We don't know if the Phoenician founders of Carthage were later replaced by Greeks, if the original Bronze Age Phoenician colonists were recruited from Greece in the first place with a small endogamous caste of Levantine elites leading them, or if they were brought in by the Phoenicians later on as a caste of maritime people subordinate to the Phoenicians who ultimately rose to become the dominant caste in Punic society as the Bronze Age Phoenician maritime empire fell apart.

The ancient DNA samples come almost entirely from the time period at and after the Punic region lost close contact with the Phoenicians of the Levant.

It is possible that Levantine Phoenicians and Greek/North African/Iberian peoples co-existed in the Punic region but were basically genetically distinct endogamous castes, and that the Phoenician ancient DNA from this later period is mostly absent from the sample because Phoenicians continued to cremate their dead, rather than because they had been replaced, while the other caste that had substantially Greek ancestry buried their dead at this point. (The Bronze Age Greeks also mostly cremated their dead at the point in time when Indo-Europeans conquered them and converted them to an Indo-European language.)

This linguistic data can help us weigh which of the possible narratives to explain the ancient DNA is most plausible.

The fact that the Punic people spoke a Phoenician language, rather than Greek or Latin, however, despite their lack of significant Levantine Phoenician genetic ancestry, suggests that the ancestors of the Punic people with Greek ancestry underwent a language shift from Greek to Phoenician due to elite dominance by a Levantine Phoenician elite.  

If ancestors of the genetically Greek Punic people had replaced the Levantine Phoenician people by simply conquering them, we would have expected the Punic people to speak a language related to Greek rather than a North Semitic language (that is a close linguistic cousin of Hebrew and Arabic).

Yet, the lack of admixture between the caste whose members had any Levantine Phoenician ancestry, and the caste that is mostly Greek in genetic ancestry tends to disfavor the presence of the non-Levantine caste in the earliest Bronze Age founding period of Carthage. This inference is particularly strong in light of that fact that the Phoenicians did have some admixture with the indigenous North Africans who proceeded them in Carthage and the vicinity.

It is more plausible that the primarily Greek caste became part of Punic society in the roughly two and a half entry long time period from the mid-sixth century BCE, when Levantine influence declined as their cities fell under the control of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, when Carthage subsequently came into conflict with Greek city-states. 

Before that, these Phoenician colonies were probably just Levantine Phoenicians and indigenous North Africans. It also seems likely that this demographic shift took place at the early end of this quarter millennium time period, allowing the dominant-subordinate status of the respective castes to emerge before the conflicts with the Greek city-states reached their high water mark.

Another possibility is that part of what keep a Levantine Phoenician caste distinct and endogamous from a caste with an ancestral Greek core, is that the Levantine Phoenician caste spoke Punic, while the caste with an ancestral Greek core spoke some dialect of Greek as their primary language, but didn't interact with the outside world much because the Levantine Phoenicians were the ruling caste of the Punic world, even though they made up only a modest percentage of the total population. 

This would have some similarities to the situation in medieval Finland while it was under Swedish rule, where power was held by Swedish speakers for centuries, even though most of the people spoke Finnish as their primary language, but with less genetic admixture between the two linguistic groups.

A Prime Planet 9 Candidate Has Been Identified

Astronomers have scoured existing solar system astronomy data from two different collaborations, twenty-three years apart, to identify a single candidate for Planet 9 using the properties that previous studies have determined it should have. 

Further observation will be needed to determine if this candidate is actually Planet 9 or not, as they have only two point in time observations from twenty-three years apart to go on. But, they now know precisely where to look for it.

How Big Are Ultralight Dark Matter Cores?

Hypothetical particles of "Cold dark matter" usually has a natural tendency to form a cusp at the center of a galaxy. But this isn't how inferred dark matter distributions look in real life. Instead, they are inferred from galaxy dynamics and lensing observations to form a more homogeneous "core" with fairly constant density a.k.a. (in some models) a soliton, in the inner region of a dark matter halo.

But hypothetical ultralight dark matter has wave-like behavior of the appropriate scale that in theory cause it to form cores in galaxies, rather than forming cuspy central regions of these dark matter halos as more massive cold dark matter particle candidates, such as WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) with masses in the GeV range, suggested as dark matter candidates in supersymmetry theories would.

A new paper explains how this happens and how big the cores are predicted to be at a technical level in ultralight dark matter scenarios. By making predictions about the size of ultralight dark matter cores, this, in turn, provides a way to test the ultralight dark matter particle theory in new observations or new analyses of old data. 

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

In theories of ultralight dark matter, solitons form in the inner regions of galactic halos. The observational implications of these depend on the soliton mass. Various relations between the mass of the soliton and properties of the halo have been proposed. We analyze the implications of these relations, and test them with a suite of numerical simulations. 

The relation of Schive et al. 2014 is equivalent to (E/M)(sol)=(E/M)(halo) where E(sol)(halo) and M(sol)(halo) are the energy and mass of the soliton (halo). If the halo is approximately virialized, this relation is parametrically similar to the evaporation/growth threshold of Chan et al. 2022, and it thus gives a rough lower bound on the soliton mass. A different relation has been proposed by Mocz et al. 2017, which is equivalent to E(sol)=E(halo), so is an upper bound on the soliton mass provided the halo energy can be estimated reliably. 

Our simulations provide evidence for this picture, and are in broad consistency with the literature, in particular after accounting for ambiguities in the definition of E(halo) at finite volume.

Kfir Blum, Marco Gorghetto, Edward Hardy, Luca Teodori, "Bracketing the soliton-halo relation of ultralight dark matter" arXiv:2504.16202 (April 22, 2025).

The introduction to the paper frames the question in the context of ultralight dark matter theories and the astronomy observations relevant to them.

Ultra-Light Dark Matter (ULDM) is a well-motivated Dark Matter (DM) candidate, potentially arising in high energy completions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. It is generically produced in the early Universe via the vacuum misalignment mechanism, and is stable on cosmological timescales. Compared to collision-less Cold Dark Matter, ULDM leads to novel behavior on distances comparable to or smaller than its de-Broglie wavelength λdB = 2π/(mv), where v is the characteristic velocity of a system. On such scales ULDM’s wave-like nature is manifest. This results in a suppression of power in cosmological perturbations, leaving observable imprints on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy power spectrum, galaxy clustering, and the Lyman-alpha forest. ULDM wave-like density fluctuations can also lead to astrophysical effects inside galaxies, such as dynamical heating and dynamical friction, leading to constraints using systems like dwarf and ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. Observational constraints on the magnitude of such effects bounds the particle mass of an ULDM candidate m that comprises all of Dark Matter to satisfy m ≳ 10^−21eV.

Another key feature of ULDM, on which we focus in this work, is the formation of cored density profiles at the centers of galaxy halos. These cores consist of ‘solitons’, which are a ground state of the system in the sense that the soliton solution to the ULDM equations of motion minimizes the energy for a fixed mass. Solitons have been seen in ULDM halos in many numerical simulations. Solitons can affect the observed rotation curves of low-surface-brightness galaxies and irregular dwarf galaxies, stellar kinematics and dynamics of dwarf galaxies, and even strong gravitational lensing time delays, and involve interesting physics such as stochastic motion and quasi-normal mode fluctuations. It has been suggested that soliton cores may play a role in resolving the core-cusp problem, namely, the mismatch between simulations of cold dark matter and observations.

A natural question is whether a soliton forms within the lifetime of a galaxy and, if so, what is its expected mass for a given host galaxy halo. Dynamical relaxation estimates of the timescale for soliton formation are consistent with the results of simulations that use “noise” initial conditions, which are designed to be in the kinetic regime. Meanwhile, simulations with cosmological initial conditions suggest that solitons in cosmological halos may form more rapidly than predicted by kinetic theory estimates. Regarding the expected soliton mass, the cosmological simulations . . . provided numerical evidence for a simple relation between the soliton mass and the host halo mass and energy. Those authors also suggested that the relation may represent an attractor of the equations of motion, supporting this point via simulations with different initial conditions. Many other investigations of the soliton-halo relation have subsequently appeared in the literature, reporting varying levels of agreement. In this work, we present a new perspective on the problem.