Sea Peoples

I've noticed that history topics getting more popularity on HN usually correlate with recent Extra History episodes.

The "Sea Peoples", a term itself controversial because they don't seem to have any strict delineation in language, art, or leadership, subsumed a much larger presence in the Mediterranean, and it is during their height that we have the earliest solid evidence of Israelites, but also of other Bronze age tribes elsewhere in Greece, Anatolia, etc.

One of these findings is really recent:

These findings may represent the most conclusive evidence that Philistines were not indigenous to Canaan which is indicated by ceramics, architecture, burial customs, and pottery remains with writing – in non-Semitic languages. Lawrence Stager of Harvard University believes that Philistines came to Canaan by ships before the Battle of the Delta circa 1175 BCE. DNA was extracted from the skeletons for archaeogenetic population analysis.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines#Burial_practices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples#Philistine_hypothe...

That doesn't answer your question, but the Hebrew origin stories always place them further east from Canaan in Mesopotamia. If the Philistines were the Sea People, it makes the clash of those two different cultures (Aegean vs Near East) make sense.

Indeed not. This is a subject that I am beginning to investigate myself, but a couple of things to note:

1. The region the Israelites stayed, Goshen, was in the Nile delta and hence a much wetter climate than the southern parts of Egypt where, as I understand it, we tend to get better preserved artifacts. The wet climate facilitates decomposition and so we have to calibrate our expectations as to what we can find.

2. The Exodus story was written several hundred years after the event. Something notable is that the story refers to the construction of the city of Pi-Ramesses, a city which did exist but had long been dismantled before the Exodus story had been written (the stones were used to build the city of Tanis). It seems strange that the writers would have gotten the detail right if the Israelites had not been there (though not impossible).

Why do you equate Canaan with Palestine?

The Exodus is said to have occurred around 1446 BCE. The first clear usage of "Palestine" to refer to that area was much later (5BC) when Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê".