The ancient Philistines, famous for their appearances in the Hebrew Bible, including the story of David and the giant Philistine Goliath - were not from present-day Israel.
The Philistines are descended from a group of seafaring Europeans.
After analyzing the DNA of 10 people buried in a Philistine archaeological site, an international team of researchers found that the Philistines descended from Greece, Sardinia and even the Iberian island (now Spain and Portugal).
These ancestors migrated across the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago.
Once the Philistines arrived in the southern Levant, an area that embraced the eastern Mediterranean, they married the locals.
"Within no more than two centuries, this genetic imprint introduced by the early Iron Age is no longer detectable," says Choongwon Jeong, archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Historians and archaeologists have spent decades trying to decipher the origins of the Philistines. In addition to the mentions in the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines also appear in the texts left by the ancient Egyptians.
By referring to these Hebrew and Egyptian texts, archaeologists have been able to trace the Philistines through time and geography to a region that includes the port city of Ashkelon, in present-day Israel.
The study was published online in the journal Science Advances.