Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Jews

A journey from the 11th century BCE to 21th century CE

08.10.25 | Duarte Pacheco Pereira

The Phoenician Expansion c. 11th to 6th centuries BCE

World History Encyclopedia
Illustration by Simeon Netchev, published here on 09 November 2021

A map illustrating the expansion of the Phoenicians, including the trade routes and process of Phoenician colonization, from its origins in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, until its height when it spanned from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.

X1 as a marker of the Phoenicians, the Jews, and the Druze

By Geoffrey Sea in ‘Adena Core’ Facebook discussion group on March 28, 2025 at 04:15 PM

Map of X1 frequency (including X1c) generated with Phylogeographer

Mitochondrial haplogroup X has long confounded analysts because of its very weird distribution. Frequencies of its various branches reach peaks in Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, in northern Scotland, in an Anabaptist sect of Wisconsin, and among the Ojibwe and M’kmaq of North America. That mysterious distribution led to rival wack-job pseudoscience theories by the Mormons and by fraudsters pushing the impossible “Solutrean Hypothesis,” which suggested that the Native Americans with X have gotten it by a trans-Atlantic migration of people from France.

Some establishment scientists have not been much help. The dethroned Beringia model of American settlement created the bizarre mythology of X-carriers surviving in the high Arctic of “Beringia” for thousands of years during the Ice Age, before descending to the habitable earth like gods from Mount Olympus. And then the Afrocentrists proposed that X developed in the Sahara, making it “African,” implying some Darwinian virtue of haplogroup X that would make it beneficial in the opposite climates of the hot arid desert and the frozen Arctic.

In addition, because the major branches X1 and X2 developed in Israel-Lebanon and Assyria, respectively, having mixed during the Assyrian Empire’s occupation of the Levant, the haplogroup has been prey to multiple variations of “Lost Tribes” mythology, based on the old hokum, begun by Christian missionaries, about the Ojibwe having originated as Jews, a theory we can thank for the many circumcision jokes encoded in Victorian-era anthropology texts.

None of this has been scientific or related to real history. Happily, with recently-analyzed ancient samples of X, including the Kennewick Man sample from the Columbia River, he being a likely Algonquian (including Ojibwe) ancestor, with discovery of the root clade of X in Saudi Arabia, and with new studies of the Druze, who carry an extreme diversity of X branches, the real history of haplogroup X has begun to be sorted out. Revision of the X phylogeny in 2023 (Augustin et al.) has also been extremely helpful, and we can now see clearly that Native American X2a came from Siberia via the Pacific Northwest, not from across the Atlantic or from Arctic Beringia.

The dating of Kennewick Man to about 8600 years before present, and the extremely limited distribution of X2a in North Americans – effectively limited to the speakers of Almosan languages and groups highly influenced by them – strongly suggests that X entered North America no more than 10,000 years ago with proprietary Proto-Almosan migrations from Siberia. Beringia was not involved.

Haplogroup X has four main branches, thankfully named X1 to X4, though the phylogeny has changed radically in recent years and cladistic naming remains in dispute. It is now approaching consensus that the root X mutation did not occur in north Africa; rather it occurred on the Arabian Peninsula or nearby, while the major clade X1’2’3 almost certainly originated in the Levant, among the Kebaran ancestors of the Natufians. Throughout its early development, haplogroup X was closely associated with Y-haplogroup E, and we can infer that there were many Kebaran and Natufian E men who hooked up with X women.

It was long assumed that X2 developed from X1. The new phylogeny shows that this was not the case: They developed in parallel, with X1 actually having a later TMRCA of 8,900 years, compared to X2 with a TMRCA of 13,000 years. The very great time depth traditionally attributed to the root clade of X of more than 20,000 years turns out to apply only to the prehistory of the haplogroup before any of its major branches developed, i.e. the first 7,000 years at least of haplogroup X were limited to local movements between Arabia and the Levant. (All phylogeny data based on YFull.) The Solutrean Hypothesis, which required that X crossed the Atlantic more than 20,000 years ago, is ruled out by chronology alone.

By the way, since X is a daughter of haplogroup N, the moving of X’s origin from Africa to Asia helps resolve whether N originated in Africa or Asia. It had long been argued that if X came from Africa, that meant N must have been African also. This argument has been mooted.

X2 emerged in the eastern border region between Turkey and Syria, close to Kurdistan and Armenia, a region that can be called Assyria. That its TMRCA is only 13,000 years ago is another proof that it was not involved in any Beringia business; the Beringia land bridge disappeared around 14,000 years ago. Chronology requires that the X2a’j clade had to hightail it across Asia in order to cross the Aleutians by boat around 10,000 or 9,000 years ago, in time for Kennewick Man to arrive at the Columbia River. This was a tight schedule. Other branches of X2 headed into Europe, Central Asia, or the Middle East.

X1 is much more restricted than X2. Numerous analysts have noted that it is limited to the Afroasiatic peoples and those who have been in close contact with them, especially evident in the Levant and in Egypt. In a way this observation has been unfortunate because it has spurred connections to the numerous very bad theories about the development of Afroasiatic language, such as the wrong idea that this language family moved from Africa into Asia. In line with those bad theories, it is often said that haplogroup X is frequent in the Horn of Africa. This is misleading because, though X can be found in Somalia at trace levels, it has filtered down to Somalia from Egypt and the Levant; the presence of X in Africa is mostly limited to the Egyptian, Berber, and Ethiopian populations, all of which descend from Levantine and Arabian populations. X frequency shows a radical north to south cline along the valleys of the Nile and the Red Sea.

Without getting sidetracked into a discussion of those bad theories of Afroasiatic, the emergent consensus is that most Afroasiatic language branches actually came from the hypothesized Natufian language of the Levant, a language for which we have no direct evidence since the Natufians predated writing; however, it is now common to suggest Natufian language as Proto-Afroasiatic. The Natufians, who spread from the Levant through Sinai into Egypt, were the likely spreaders also of haplogroup X1. The patterns of X1 and Afroasiatic language are the same, both suggesting a Natufian origin, with X1 effectively limited to the Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic, and Berber peoples, for whom the Natufians were the common ancestor.

Though no X1 or its precursor haplogroups have yet been reported in a Natufian sample, that is likely because very few mtDNA haplogroups have been reported for Natufians as of yet. Yet X1 has been found in Pre-Pottery Neolithic descendants of the Natufians. X1c has been found in a Neolithic burial of the Cardium Pottery Culture on the northeast coast of Spain; the Cardium Culture had Levantine origin, from which it spread along the northern coast of the Mediterranean. X1c has also been found in an Egyptian mummy dated to 2,815 ybp, found at the Abusir-el-meleq site. The Spanish and Egyptian ancient samples together imply that X1c came from the Levant.

That conclusion is strengthened by two anomalous cases of X1c. The population with the highest frequency of X1c in the world is the endogamous communitarian Hutterite sect, now settled in Wisconsin and nearby Canada. The Hutterites immigrated to the Great Plains from Ukraine in the 1870s, where mostly Hutterite men had resettled after attempts to exterminate the Anabaptist sect in Hungary and Romania. My own research on the Hutterites suggests that the likely explanation of their X frequency is that the philosemitic sect acquired a Jewish bride in Ukraine, who became the matrilineal founder of many of the modern Hutterites. While haplogroup X is rare in European Jews, because much of the Jewish immigration in Europe involved men who found brides in Europe, X is present at around 1% frequency. One celebrity carrier of haplogroup X is Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, though he has apparently pulled his brother’s DNA testing data from the internet, so we don’t know if he carries X1 or X2.

Netanyahu is not the biggest celebrity with haplogroup X; that honor goes to the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln DNA project determined that Lincoln carried X1c on the basis of maternally-related cousins. There has been surprisingly little commentary on the finding, undoubtedly because of the “sensitive” issue of whether it means that his mother was Jewish, something that Lincoln himself suspected in his lifetime. (Lincoln’s mother died when the boy was nine years old, and Abraham knew very little about her ancestry; he did say he thought he inherited his intelligence from her, and he told a rabbi that he had Jewish “parentage.”) I’ve conducted extensive research on this topic. In short, my conclusion is that Lincoln’s maternal lineage leads to women of Spanish descent who moved to England in association with the Spanish-English royal marriages of the 16th century. That is to say that his X1c very likely came from Spain, probably not from Spanish Jews but more likely from the Neolithic introduction of X1c to Spain or from the substantial Phoenician colonization of Spain.

Note that what was long called X1c has been renamed as X3a, but I will continue to use X1c as it corresponds to the name in most of the literature. This haplogroup has also been found in Sicily, Israel (Jews), Tunisia, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Portugal, and Brazil (Portuguese) – all except Brazil places frequented by the Phoenicians. The name change is especially confusing because “X3a” has also been used to name a branch of Native American X2a.

It is clear from the data that the Phoenicians spread X1/X3 and X2 throughout the Mediterranean. A Phoenician sample of X2b from the 5th century BCE was found in Sardinia (Matisoo-Smith, 2018), X2b being the most frequent European branch of X. X1/X3 is less evident from ancient samples but was obviously carried by the Phoenicians as is evident from the map shown here, the map of X1 frequency (including X1c) generated with Phylogeographer.

Aside from the large hotspots in Egypt, the next largest hotspots are centered on the former Phoenician colonies of Carthage (Tunisia) and Cadiz (southern Spain). Spain has the largest national X1/X3 frequency outside of Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, attributable to Phoenician descendants of the Spanish Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

The hotspot over Amsterdam can be attributed to the many Spanish Jews, including the family of Spinoza, having moved to Amsterdam following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. The curious hotspot over Kabul, Afghanistan, is also attributable to Jews as the Kabul Jews came there from Persia and one of the X1 carriers from Kabul identified as a Persian Jew. The Jewish community of Kabul, which was historically substantial, has relocated entirely to Israel, and the last Jew in Kabul, Zablon Simintov, reportedly left for Israel in 2021.

There is an X1 cluster in Denmark, which likely arose because the Norse long raided Spain and other territories in the western Mediterranean, sometimes bringing captured women home with them. Similarly there is a pocket of X1c in Norway, carried to the US Midwest where a carrier has blogged about it. Lastly, the hotspot over the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan lies squarely over the territory of the ancient Kura-Araxes Culture, which long engaged in trade and population exchange with the Neolithic Levant.

Every part of the analysis so far is logical, following from the realization that X1 or its precursors were Natufian and so should be most prominent in the main Natufian descendants – the Phoenicians, the Jews, and the Egyptians. But then there is a huge anomaly. Frequency among Jews and Egyptians remains extremely low, with haplogroup X reaching at most 2% in Israel and Egypt. A single oasis in western Egypt has a frequency of 14%, but this is a local product of endogamy such as in the enclaves of the Hutterites or in the Orkney Islands of Scotland.

Among the Druze of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, X frequency reaches between 15% and 26%. Moreover, the Druze have an extraordinary diversity of X haplotypes, with a 2008 study (Shlush et al.) finding two haplotypes of X1 and six haplotypes of X2 just among the Druze. Since the Druze are not usually considered as descended from Jews or Egyptians, why would this be?

Some analysts, including prominent Israeli geneticists, have jumped to the conclusion that haplogroup X originated in the Druze, who represent a “refugium” of the original X population. This is an absurdity on its face because the Druze formed as a group, with their unique religion, only in the 11th century CE, tens of thousands of years after the formative period of haplogroup X.

The answer lies in the unique history of the Druze. Long before that name was acquired, the genetic group that would later form the core of the Druze formed in Assyria, with the Druze continuing to look like an Assyrian population genetically. This was confirmed in a 2016 study by Scarlett Marshall et al. in Scientific Reports titled “Reconstructing Druze population history.” Those authors used the GPS genetic location method to find the likely origin of the Druze population based on DNA. They concluded: “Druze biogeographic affinity, migration patterns, time of emergence and genetic similarity to Near Eastern populations are highly suggestive of Armenian-Turkish ancestries for the proto-Druze.”

That conclusion was slightly misstated. They did not find that the Druze originated with the Armenian and Turkish people; rather they found that the Proto-Druze came from the geographical region around the common border area of Turkey, Armenia, Syria, and Kurdistan, a region synonymous with Assyria.

For reasons defying past explanation, the Proto-Druze migrated to the Levant, specifically to the area between the Galilee and Mount Lebanon, near the triple border between Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, where the Druze religion was invented in the 11th century CE. Given this history, it is evident that the Proto-Druze mainly acquired their X2 in Assyria, and acquired their X1 in the Galilee-Lebanon region, sequentially. The high frequency of X in the Druze is therefore primarily the result of their chosen migration, which connected two regions that happened to be the bastions of X2 and X1, respectively. They are not a “refugium” of some very-ancient population. Rather, they are a recently-formed amalgam of different haplogroup X populations.

Therefore, the big question about the Druze and haplogroup X should be reframed to ask why the Proto-Druze, as we can call them, chose to migrate from Assyria to the Levant. The probable answer is: It was not a coincidence.

Connections between Assyria and the Levant were very ancient, as we have already seen, beginning with the birth of agriculture in the western and northern regions of the Fertile Crescent. In the late Neolithic period, this relationship flowered in the connection between the Pottery Neolithic cultures of Israel and the Kura-Araxes Culture of greater Armenia, a connection that spread haplogroup X1c across the Mediterranean in the Cardium Pottery Culture. This same relationship led to the joining of Assyria and the Levant in the Assyrian Empire, if we strip that development of its negative biblical gloss. But it’s interesting that even the bible mythology tells of big population movements between these two regions, though not in a historically-accurate way.

It is seldom appreciated that the Assyria-Israel relationship went both ways, with a large Canaanite influence on the Assyrians, evident in a convergence of Tree-of-Life iconography in both regions, one result of which was the Phoenician-Jewish menorah. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire at the hands of the Babylonians in the 7th century BCE, a kingdom emerged in the Assyrian heartland, just south of Armenia, called Adiabene. According to the Encyclopedia Iranica, the name arose from “general hatred” of the Assyrian brand, but the people of Adiabene were the former Assyrians. Adiabene survived and rose to prominence after the Persians expelled the Seleucids from the region, in the last centuries before the common era.

An extraordinary event too often neglected by historians is that Crown Prince Izates of Adiabene was, as a child, sent to lower Mesopotamia for his protection from the Romans in the early years of the common era. In Mesopotamia, he was converted to Judaism by a Jewish merchant, after which he converted his parents, King Monobazus and Queen Helena, whereupon the entire Kingdom of Adiabene became devoutly Jewish, complete with Torah study and the application of Mosaic law. This history was recounted by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus and is summarized in the Encyclopedia Iranica.

Queen Helena made a celebrated trip to Jerusalem, variously dated to 30 or 46 CE, building a palace there, and allegedly moving her court there, bringing an infusion of wealth to the city at a time of resistance to Roman rule. She had grain and figs imported to Jerusalem to relieve famine there. Upon the death of King Monobazus, Izates became king of Adiabene in 36 CE (supporting the 30 CE date of Queen Helena’s trip to Jerusalem since she was allegedly still queen), retaining his devotion to Judaism, so much so that he was circumcised, and Adiabene remained Jewish for at least a century after his rule. Both Izates and Helena are mentioned adoringly in the Talmud.

The Romans invaded Adiabene in 114 CE, but were held off by the Parthians, who, under Zoroastrian rule, were tolerant of Judaism, but Jewish monarchs disappeared in Adiabene at around that time, while numerous Jewish communities remained. The Parthians were overthrown by the Sassanians in 224 CE, and while the latter retained Zoroastrianism as their state religion, they were far less tolerant of minorities, including the Jews. The Sassanians lasted until replaced by the Caliphate of Baghdad in the 7th century; the Muslims lost all tolerance for Jews within their domain, so at least by the 7th century, the Jewish communities of Adiabene had been vacated.

The salient question is what became of the Adiabene Jews. One might expect that they became the Jews of Kurdistan, but DNA studies suggest that the Kurdish Jews came from the Jews of Byzantium after the Byzantine Empire expanded eastward, in wars against the Caliphate of Baghdad. It is highly likely that many Adiabene Jews moved north into Armenia, becoming the Jews of old Armenia, who subsequently fled further north to escape the Byzantine-Muslim wars. It is historically documented that these “Armenian Jews,” formerly the Jews of Adiabene, crossed the mountains and moved north into Khazaria, where they reportedly played a role in the conversion of the Khazar royal house to Judaism in the 8th century CE.

Another possibility has been overlooked. It would have been logical for the Jews of Adiabene to migrate to Israel, following the path of their former royals, when departure from Adiabene became necessary. And here we have an explanation for the presence of a large community of haplogroup X carriers in the Galilee by the 11th century – the founding community of the people we now know as the Druze. The religion that they invented in the 11th century, under pressure from the Muslim defenders against the Christian Crusaders, is an explicit syncretism of Islam and Judaism. The Druze themselves claim that even before they adopted their present religion, they knew the patriarchs Abraham and Moses, and this largely explains their strong loyalty to the state of Israel.

I am proposing that the Druze began to form in the 11th century as an amalgam of three groups then living in the Israel-Lebanon-Syria border region:

1. Communities of former Adiabene Jews who had relocated to the Galilee to be among other Jews, but who had remained endogamous due to their former isolated situation in Adiabene. This group carried a diversity of X2 haplotypes from the Assyrian region.
2. Typical Lebanese residents, who even then were split between Islam and Christianity. This group carried both X1 and X2 haplotypes from their Phoenician ancestry.
3. Many Kurdish families who came to dominate Lebanon and Syria during the Ottoman Empire. (Many Druze carry Kurdish surnames.) These were formerly Muslim Kurds, not Jewish Kurds. This is important because Kurdish Muslims carry a high frequency of haplogroup X and are genetically closer to Judean Jews than are Kurdish Jews (Hammer, 2002).

Thus, all three component parts of the Druze people carried high frequencies of haplogroup X, but different subclades of X, explaining the high X diversity in the Druze. The coincidence of these groups coming together in a compact region results from the Adiabene conversion to Judaism in the 1st century CE and the resulting desire of former Adiabene Jews to move to Israel, as well as the internal dynamics of the Ottoman Empire that gave Kurds influence over Lebanon and Syria.

The Druze genetic mix has not been otherwise explained. Saying that the Druze, a relatively modern group, represent a “refugium” from very ancient times is not a viable explanation. Rather, they began as a “tribe of Israel” that found itself and returned to unite with long-separated maternal-lineage cousins.

End of "X1 as a marker of the Phoenicians, the Jews, and the Druze"