.Anyway, that's all I'm driving at with my comments. The historicity of the Book of Mormon can be easily brought into question in all kinds of ways. But, in my opinion, the DNA argument is a totally losing proposition in the sense that it is no longer a scientifically valid argument to claim that incursions to the Americas from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, etc. did not occur until after Columbus bumped into the Caribbean on his way to China.

LDS Newsroom
The conclusions of genetics, like those of any science, are tentative, and much work remains to be done to fully understand the origins of the native populations of the Americas.

SGS
The DNA science is not tentative or inconclusive. It is consistent with scientific conclusions about Native American origins from numerous other scientific disciplines.

LDS Newsroom
At the April 1929 general conference, President Anthony W. Ivins of the First Presidency cautioned: “We must be careful in the conclusions that we reach. The Book of Mormon … does not tell us that there was no one here before them [the peoples it describes]. It does not tell us that people did not come after.”

SGS
I find it hard to pay attention to the words of a member of the First Presidency from 85 years ago because the words of many, more recent, prophets are RINGING IN MY EARS.

[
So what I'm trying to say here is that the DNA arguments against the Book of Mormon are never going to be winning arguments for the simple reason that they depend on assumptions about the Americas that are as rigid and unsupportable as the Book of Mormon saying that no one was on the continent after a global flood of Noah until the Jaredites hit the shore in their fancy submarines. The trend in ancient America anthropology/archaeology is towards an understanding that recognizes multiple prongs of contact from the so-called "Old World", both across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. From Africa to Norway on the one side and from the South Pacific to Siberia on the other. I think we're just beginning to understand how amazingly mobile ancient civilizations really were, and our knowledge of who could possibly be represented in the DNA of "native" Americans is changing from year to year.

Ludd, you need to get your head out of the popular anthropology and archaeology magazines and stop thinking the Discovery Channel is science. Most of what they produce is wild speculation and you are just regurgitating it. Junk science mags and docos have been banging on about Phoenecian, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Spaceman migrations for the last 50 years. Its all b***s*** designed to sell more copy and to get bums on seats. Its about $$$$. And the sensationalist approach works because a new crop of gullible fools comes along every generation, hungry for this sort of crap.

The DNA is not the magic bullet but you would be foolish to think that it hasn't made a dent on the Book of Mormon. That's why the essay was written. This was a very risky essay for the church to put out. But they had no choice because the church is bleeding its youth who are much more swayed by science. The fact is that all Native American DNA is derived from Asia. The handful of lineages that are not are clearly derived from post-Columbus admixture. They are either Africa or western European. There may have been the odd Polynesian or Viking who stumbled into the Americas but their contribution to the gene pool was insignificant.

Ludd, you need to get your head out of the popular anthropology and archaeology magazines and stop thinking the Discovery Channel is science. Most of what they produce is wild speculation and you are just regurgitating it. Junk science mags and docs have been banging on about Phoenecian, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Spaceman migrations for the last 50 years. Its all b***s*** designed to sell more copy and to get bums on seats. Its about $$$$. And the sensationalist approach works because a new crop of gullible fools comes along every generation, hungry for this sort of crap.

It is exceedingly unlikely (some would say not possible) that Mormon would have been a pure descendant of Lehi, after more than 800 years and some 40 generations, if ...

"The father is always uncertain" (i.e., the identity of a child’s father is always in question)

Freud in Family Romances (1909) states that pater semper incertus est while the mother is certissima –
Note: at the present time Genealogical DNA testing can establish paternity with certainty.

A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.

It's that it can't tell us much about population dynamics over long periods of time.

It isn't a reliable method of tracing populations over considerably longer periods of times (in the hundreds or thousands of years).

The picture emerging from the latest studies is one that seems to suggest lots of contact between the "Old World" and the "New World" going clear back to Roman times and earlier.

...



You keep posting this. What studies support that claim?

I think for any religious person, the issue will always be, science can not prove Divinity.

Christian, Muslim, Israelite, Mormon, science can not prove the Divine of them.

This essay is just the latest example of how of how the apologists are now driving the interpretation of doctrine and scripture rather than the prophets, seers, and revelators.

1. For anyone who has been following this issue, there is nothing really new or groundbreaking with this article. It is, rather, a basic summarization of the work of John Sorenson, Ugo Perego, Michael Whiting, Matthew Roper, John Butler, and other scholars who have written on this subject.

...

3. The article approvingly cites the work of scholars and apologists associated with what was formerly known as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS). This includes a volume edited by Daniel C. Peterson, former editor of the FARMS Review (now the Mormon Studies Review) and a prominent Mormon apologist. This should be clear indication that, contrary to the recently claims of some, the Church has not backed away from what is sometimes derisively called “classic FARMS” apologetics. To the contrary, the Church has appealed to “classic FARMS” scholarship in its own apologetic for the Book of Mormon.

This essay is just the latest example of how of how the apologists are now driving the interpretation of doctrine and scripture rather than the prophets, seers, and revelators.

i think it's more to the point to say scientific and social progress are driving the interpretation of doctrine.

the apologists are consultants, not theologians.

The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.... At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same Hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

Where is the evidence for your last claim Mr somewhat of a student? There is currently no genetic evidence of significant pre-Columbian migrations from anywhere other than sub-arctic regions via eskimo migrations.

All the Raghavan study proved is that living Europeans share DNA markers with a 24,000-year-old Siberian. It is largely irrelevant because it predates the Book of Mormon and Israel (and Adam and Eve, and the Flood) by about 20,000 years. Populations in ALL major geographic regions share common sets and subsets of DNA markers. All living Eskimos share some DNA markers with Australian Aboriginals. Does that prove Eskimos came from Australia?

The "old Bering Strait theory" as you put it, is by far the best explanation for an abundance of facts. It is a well established truth that essentially all of the ancestors of the American Indians descend from Asian ancestors.

When Mormons are faced with uncomfortable scientific facts they are invariably told by their leaders that science is changing all the time so they shouldn’t be concerned. In the essay we are told the DNA data is “tentative”. But it is LDS beliefs about Native American ancestry that have been proven to be tentative. Once LDS apologists boldly aligned the Book of Mormon civilizations with the Olmec and Maya. The Lamanite presence has rapidly been contracting to the point that it has now vanished. In contrast to back-flipping prophets there has been a century long scientific consensus about where the ancestors of Native Americans came from and when they arrived in the New World. DNA is just helping to refine our knowledge.

I incorrectly assumed that you, of all people, might be on the "cutting edge" of the new scholarship emerging from the fields of archaeology and anthropology. You know, the increasing number of peer-reviewed studies by the "rising generation" of scholars who are revisiting the compelling evidence for pre-columbian cultural diffusion long-denied and long-avoided by the dying dinosaurs in the field -- all of them scared ____ that they might offend someone by advancing theories deemed by the "powers that be" to be inherently "racist" and therefore not worthy of serious consideration.

Within 20 or 30 years, people will be looking back on the anti-diffusionists with the same disdain reserved for those who fought a losing battle against plate tectonics in the previous generation.

Of course, the Book of Mormon will not be "proven true" in the process, but it will at least finally be clear in everybody's minds that the old DNA argument never had legs to stand on in the first place.

...



You keep posting this. What studies support that claim?

You know, the increasing number of peer-reviewed studies by the "rising generation" of scholars who are revisiting the compelling evidence for pre-columbian cultural diffusion long-denied and long-avoided by the dying dinosaurs in the field...