Frankish chronicler Guillaume De Tyr (William of Tyre) refers to the town as Tibénin (.."nomen priscum Tibénin"..), which might be an indication that the town existed long before the Crusaders set foot in Syria. Many of the existing families of Tibnine have a background makeup of Phoenician, European and Arab due to ranging influences in the region over centuries. Adolphe Chauvet noticed with surprise that a lot of the town folk in 1891 looked as blond as Germans, but gave no explanation for that: ("Je suis surpris de voir passablement de blonds et de blondes, comme chez les Allemands. Le docteur Lortet a fait aussi,je crois,la mème remarque.") Early Irish troops in Tebnin made the same observation many years after However the chronicler Foucher de Chartres (Fulcher of Chartres) gave a poignant explanation: ("Nam qui fuimus occidentales, nunc facti sumus orientales.= We who were Occidentals, became Orientals"). Chauvet also mentions that the village history dates back to the Canaanites but unfortunately does not cite a reference for this assertion. However, in 1966 Lorraine Copeland and Peter J. Wescombe, published archaeological findings from two sites in Tibnine: Acheulean bifacial axes on the road from Tyre which are preserved at The American University of Beirut and dated to the Lower Palaeolithic era. On the road between Tibnine and Beit Yahum, Stone Age Megaliths were found and records of them preserved at the Institut de Paléontologie humaine in Paris.