The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BCE).
The name “Peoples of the Sea” comes directly from the Egyptian records, describing the Sea Peoples’ exploits. As their collective name tells us, they were tribes who had developed a life style almost totally dependent upon the sea. They perfected boats, sailing and navigational techniques for fishing offshore as well as long distance travel and explored much of the Atlantic ocean. They invented or improved the easily constructed leather boats by discovering that oak-tanned hides would keep their shape and usefulness when used in contact with salt water and to keep their boats sea-worthy, even after many days at sea. It appears that all the Sea Peoples adhered to the ancient religion of the one Great Goddess. Close contact was maintained by boat between these tribes trading goods and to standardize their religion, universal language, traditions and oral history. As all the Sea Peoples were actively involved in exploring the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Atlantic, the people keeping up the contacts must have heard fascinating tales of daring deeds, strange discoveries, amazing experiences and also of enormous hardships and loss of life. All these legendary tales are now irretrievably lost.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/seapeopl.htm#rhnegativepopulation
Their origins undocumented, the various Sea Peoples have been proposed to have originated from places that include western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands and Southern Europe.
The people of the first ocean-born migration, which populated the northwest coast of Europe, had a very special blood peculiarity that their descendants are still living with today. This was the only tribe in the world with many of its members having Rh-negative blood. Dr. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza published a map of the populations with the highest percentage of their members with Rh-negative blood. He wrote:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/seapeopl.htm#rhnegativepopulation
“Rh-negative genes are frequent in Europe, infrequent in Africa and West Asia, and virtually absent in East Asia and among the aboriginal populations of America and Australia. One can estimate degrees of relatedness by subtracting the percentage of Rh-negative individuals among, say, the English (16%) from that among the Basques (25%) to find a difference of nine percentage points. But between the English and East Asians it becomes 16 points, a greater distance that perhaps implies a more ancient separation”.
The highest percentage is found among some of the tribes still living in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (40%). The next highest are the Basques, reported in different publications as having 25 and 32%, depending on location. The people of northwest Ireland, the Highland Scots and the western islanders of Norway all have between 16 and 25%, while the Lapps of Norway and Finland have between 5 and 7%. In addition, Cavalli-Sforza reports two small isolated populations of the same tribe, one in Chad and another in Senegal, each with about 25%. On his map, he shows an Rh-negative population in Chad, still living near the formerly enormous Chad lake. Only part of this lake still exists on the spot where the boundaries of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon meet. These people may originally have been the sailors on Chad lake. Could it be that this is the original location of the Rh-negative population that then moved to Morocco and Algiers to become the Berbers? Or would it be the other way around?
So if they existed…
… who were they?
The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars, and hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation. Existing theories variously propose equating them with several Aegean tribes, raiders from Central Europe, scattered soldiers who turned to piracy or became refugees, and links with natural disasters such as earthquakes or climatic shifts.