Digging deep
"People have not really looked at this heritage, and I think we ought to be looking more," Dr Pierre Zalloua, from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon, told BBC News.
Chris Tyler-Smith, co-author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, commented: "When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians. All we had to guide us was history.
Archaeologists excavating Phoenician settlement in Beirut, Lebanon
The researchers used historical information to focus their study
"We knew where they had and hadn't settled. But this simple information turned out to be enough, with the help of modern genetics, to trace a vanished people."
The new findings have emerged from the Genographic Project, a multi-million-dollar effort to trace human migrations using genetics. Details appear in the prestigious American Journal of Human Genetics.
The study focused on the Y, or male, chromosome, a package of genetic material carried only by men that is passed down from father to son more or less unchanged, just like a surname.
But over many generations, the chromosome accumulates small changes, or copying errors, in its DNA sequence.
These can be used to classify male chromosomes into different groups (called haplogroups) which, to some extent, reflect a person's geographical ancestry.
They looked at the genetic signatures carried on the Y chromosomes of men from former Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean. The sites included coastal Lebanon, Cyprus, Crete, Malta, eastern Sicily, southern Sardinia, Ibiza, southern Spain, coastal Tunisia and the city of Tingris in Morocco.
They then compared the Y chromosomes of these men with those of males from nearby places where the Phoenicians had never lived.
This focussed approach uncovered a small number of recurring genetic signatures in men from the Phoenician sites. These genetic lineages also led back to the Levant region - the Phoenician homeland.
