>>17816605They couldn't find samples before 600 BC and assume that they simply shifted away from cremation practices.
>The authors obtained genome-wide data for 196 individuals from 14 sites identified as Phoenician and Punic all across the Near East, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily and Sardinia, as well as an early Iron-Age individual from Algeria. These regions include both the Phoenician homeland, and the sweep of the western Mediterranean that would have been part of the Carthaginian Empire in the 4th through 3rd centuries BC. Unfortunately, the dataset only includes Punic individuals after 600 BC, since the universal preference prior was for cremation. The shift away from cremation began several centuries after the initial settlement from Phoenicia, which, as we’ve noted, likely dates to the 900’s at the latest. And yet still, with genome-wide coverage, these samples allow a detailed survey of the breadth of genealogies present across the Punic settlement zone from Carthage’s peak centuries of power, all the way into the early decades of Rome’s pan-Mediterranean domination.I guess it's possible that the Levantines were there all along and that they were simply extremely studious about cremating all of their people at all levels of society until the end, but that seems unlikely. We have plenty of samples from Phoenicia itself. The paper itself is paywalled so I don't know their reasoning for assuming these were actual Carthaginians:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08913-3
