If Phoenician mariners reached America, they should have left an imprint in the gene pool of the Amerindians. The same can be said about the Carthagininans, who took over after the original Phoenician towns fell and declined after the Babylonians and Persians gained power in the region.
According to a paper published in Nature in April 2025, the Phoenicians spread across the Mediterranean, but left little genetic imprint in their colonies. Their culture, language, alphabet, religion and trade were the tools that created the Punic society and civilization. However, their genetic imprint was small. The study looked into the genetic makeup of Punic people across the Mediterranean and its main conclusion is summarized in its title: "Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors." Since their homeland was in what is now Lebanon, no Levantine ancestry means that their genes got diluted as they sailed west colonizing the Mediterranean.
In this paper, the authors analyzed the remains of Punic people in Sicily, North Africa (including Carthage), Spain, Sardinia, and the Phoenician homeland in the Middle East, and found that:
"Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links. Instead, these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all of the sampled sites, including in Carthage itself. Different Punic sites across the central and western Mediterranean show similar patterns of high genetic diversity. We also detect genetic relationships across the Mediterranean, reflecting shared demographic processes that shaped the Punic world"
The paper found that the dominant Y haplogroup in the Levant Bronze and Iron Age cluster is not J2 but J1a, found in half the samples in the Levant, but only present in 8.4% of the Punic men, the authors conclude that "This signal of substantially different Y haplogroup patterns is consistent with the autosomal signal of little genetic ancestry in Punic individuals deriving from the Levant." (Suppl. Information Sect. 4
The image below (source) shows the J1 haplo in Europe.
If the same situation happened in America, following a Punic colonization, the genetic impact of Carthaginians and Phoenicians would have also been very small.
When looking at the global prevalence of J1a haplogroup we see very few in the Americas (source), mostly in Colombia, Peru, and then a few in US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Of course, the expansion of Islam into Spain and Portugal starting in 711 AD would have provided additional J1a material into Iberia, and this would have also ended up in the Hispanic colonies in America. The migration of people into America following its discovery in 1492 AD would have also introduced the J1a halpogroup.
For instance, a paper about the diverse Y-chromosome haplogroups found in Bolivia, a country with a very high Native American ancestry, shows that J1 and J2 haplogroups have a share between 1% and 7% of the total. This is not Phoenician, but haplogroups introduced by migrants over the past 500 years.
Trying to find evidence of Punic presence in Prehispanic America through Y-chromosome haplogroups will not be easy as it would imply sifting through later layers of the same haplogroups.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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