Animals in the Book of Mormon

[thesometimesaint]

Mola Ram Suda Ram:

I don't believe we're that far along in our knowledge of archaeology to know either way, or if it is something altogether different.

I was just reading in Scientific American where the human body if left exposed to the elements will decompose to a pile of bones in as little as two week, to as long as two years. After some 1500 years I don't expect we'll find much of anything to be left.

[Ariarates]

I was just reading in Scientific American where the human body if left exposed to the elements will decompose to a pile of bones in as little as two week, to as long as two years. After some 1500 years I don't expect we'll find much of anything to be left.

And yet...

Look at this pretty picture. You can click on it and see fossil horse remains from as far back as 55 million years ago. No sign of BoM horse remains, though.

Newsflash for the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" fallacy crowd: the absence of evidence IS evidence of absence IF evidence can be reasonably expected to exist.

[handys003]

Interesting how horses originate in the New World. Then they migrate becoming prominent in the Old World where they become domesticated and many horse cultures develop (Mongols, tartars etc..). However they die out in the New World before man is supposed to exist in such. Now how did horses die out in the New World with no men to prey. I won't subscribe to glacial as the horse in the Old World would do such also. Science has not defined a specific predator that would do such either. Apparent as today their is none in the New World that demonstrates such large enough decimation. It is not logical otherwise the horse never really existed in the New World to begin with? Something to think about hmm.....?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

And yet...

Newsflash for the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" fallacy crowd: the absence of evidence IS evidence of absence IF evidence can be reasonably expected to exist.

To bad it is not a fallacy to state that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

Nice try there but you had an epic fail.

[thesometimesaint]

Ariarates:

Until a relative few years ago there no physical evidence of the horse cultures of Asia. Then they found a few bones.

It wasn't that long ago that the city of Troy was considered a tall tale. Until they found it. http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q415.html

The archaeological research of Mesoamerica is in its infancy, and much much more remains to be discovered than has been discovered. By and large we don't even know where to look. Let alone what we are looking at. Will the discovery of horse bones PROVE the BoM. No, not even to me a TBM. But it will provide valuable evidence.

[jmordecai]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but how do we know an Nephite artifact or anything Nephite when we see it?

The same way Joseph Smith was able to?

[Tarski]

To bad it is not a fallacy to state that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

Nice try there but you had an epic fail.

Look. This absence of evidence thing is clearly misused. Take a simple example. Suppose that I consider the hypothesis that 15 percent of the books in a certain library contain money sandwiched between pages 2 and 3. Now suppose that I open a random sample of 80 percent of the books and check and suppose that I find no money. While it is possible that the 15% with money are still hiding among the 20% I did not open, surely I have provided evidence against the money hypothesis.

More practically, on what basis can we ever say that a certain animal has gone extinct? If absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in any important sense at all then why do we confidently say that the brontosaurus is extinct? Have we checked everywhere? Might there be 25 foot tall men somewhere? (Does the absence of evidence count for nothing toward the claim that such men do not exist?)

"absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is apporximately true but only when the search has not begun or has only been going on for a short time.

Here is what is true: "absence of evidence is not an absolute proof of absence".

But who cares about absolute proof. Is there absolute proof that cats can't pilot fighter jets or balance checkbooks?

Look, the style or type of arguments you guys are providing would work just as well (or just as poorly) if your goal was to defend the notion that dinosaurs roamed north America until 1492.

There is a reason that mainsteam paleontologists still overwhelmingly maintain that horses were not present in the Americas during the disputed time period (so called BoM times). The claim that this is 50 years out of date is nonsense!

[thesometimesaint]

Tarski:

80% of anything is not a random sample.

A closer example would be I've hidden a cashiers check for $1,000,000 in some random book somewhere in the Library of Congress. I can't tell you the title of the book, what the cover looks like, or anything other than there is the check. You taking up the search looking in your local library of a few books. Then declare that the Library of Congress is a fairy tale, that there never was a check, and that I'm a fraud.

The basis for declaring an animal extinct, or very near extinction, is pretty easy. When the mate of the last known breeding pair dies, or is no longer able to reproduce. That animal is extinct, or very soon will be.

While I seriously doubt the brontosaurus is still alive. IF a living breeding pair were to show up then we'd have to rewrite the paleontology books. The field of archaeology has no such constraints. All anyone has to do is find horse bones in the vast area of Mesoamerica from the correct time frame. Even then all that wouldn't PROVE the BoM true. All it would show is evidence for the horse. IOW We're just one dig away from the horse.

In reference to the archaeology of Mesoamerica. It is still in its infancy. Literally we have just scratched the surface.

You might be interested in this.

http://www.lds-mormon.com/smithson.shtml

[Hestia]

The same way Joseph Smith was able to?

Hopefully this wasn't intended as an insult as we won't go in that direction.

[Stargazer]

One explanation I've heard is that the animals spoken of in the Book of Mormon were brought over by the Jaredites and later used by the Nephites. It is postulated that all these animals simply died off as Nephites were wiped out and the Lamanite civilization fell apart. As the civilizations fell apart, all the animals were hunted down for food until they became extinct.

That's reasonable, I think, but despite that I would accept it as a plausible explanation, it is not presently provable, I think.

The tapir/horse thing, where Terry says that is less believable than the bison/cattle thing, simply because a tapir doesn't really resemble a horse all that much, I have to say that to those who had never seen horses before (because they were second or third generation Lehites) but had a word in their vocabulary that was said to describe an animal that was big enough to carry things, sometimes even people, well why would they invent a word out of whole cloth to describe a new animal that seemed to answer to the description of "horse"? The hippopotamus is, after all, not related to nor do they look particularly horse-like, yet the Greeks had no problem calling them "river horses."

In my own family history I have a similar situation. One of my great great grandmothers was born around 1845 in what later became Butte County, California. She was a Maidu Konkow Indian. The Konkow language is largely extinct now, though some of my cousins are attempting to revive it, and I have learned a little bit of it myself. The word for deer in Konkow is "kumi". When the white men came to their lands, my ancestors saw the horses and cattle, but didn't have a word for either one. So they simply applied a word that seemed to come closest, and that word was "kumi". Now, Terry you may look back and forth all you like between a Jersey cow and a deer, and imagine to yourself that nobody could possibly confuse the two, but that doesn't matter. And it isn't that they were confused, but they didn't have a word for that specific animal, and rather than call a cow a "gobblestop" or a "hornswoggle", they prudently gave it a name that actually seemed to fit closest. I can't say if they used any adjectives to particularize these kumis from the ones they were already familiar with, but there we are. There is evidence, by the way, that they didn't. They simply called a cow a deer.

"Hmmm," I can hear my 3GGFather saying to himself, "well, it has something on its head that looks like antlers, it chews the cud, it has four legs and cloven hoofs, and you can eat them. Gotta be some kind of deer." So he whips out an arrow, nocks to the bowstring and shoots it. Later, as he brings it back to the encampment, he peers say to him, "What is that thing, anyway?" "It's a deer." "Mighty big deer, Tu-me-ja-nem!" "Well, it is, but what of it? Nice thing is, we can make two blankets out of it, instead of just one. I think I'm going to hunt these new deer exclusively from now on. I hope there are more of them."

[jmordecai]

Hopefully this wasn't intended as an insult as we won't go in that direction.

Not at all. It's my understanding he was able to identify buried bones as belonging to a Lamanite named Zelph, a Nephite tower, etc. Further identifications of Nephite remains have not been made since.

[Zakuska]

Extinct Pigs? This was intresting.

The Chacoan peccary has the unusual distinction of having been first described based on fossils and was originally thought to be only an extinct species. In 1975 the animal was discovered to still be alive and well in the Chaco region of Paraguay. The species was well known to the native people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary

And who can ever forget about these...

The coelacanths, which are related to lungfishes and tetrapods, were believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. More closely related to tetrapods than even the ray-finned fish, coelacanths were considered[by whom?] the "missing link" between the fish and the tetrapods until the first Latimeria specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa, off the Chalumna River in 1938.[1] This discovery 80 million years after they were believed to have gone extinct makes them arguably the most well-known example of a Lazarus taxon, a species that seems to have disappeared from the fossil record only to reappear much later. Since 1938, Latimeria chalumnae have been found in the Comoros, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and in iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Coelacanth

"Extinct" Pygmy Elephants Found Living on Borneo

John Roach

for National Geographic News

April 23, 2008<P class=intro>A gift exchange between Asian rulers several centuries ago may have inadvertently saved a population of elephants from extinction, according to a new study. Today a small population of unusually placid and genetically distinct elephants lives in the northeast corner of Borneo, a Southeast Asian island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei (see map).

I think all of these qualify as examples of "Absence of evidence isn't evcidence of absence".

[Tarski]

Tarski:

80% of anything is not a random sample.

Why not? I assign each book a number and put numbers on cards. Then I shuffle the cards for hours and then separate out the top 80% and open those books.

Even 10% is some evidence against the proposition (just not so much).

My point stands.

Oh and....

Tell me on what basis science has up until this point asserted that certain species went extinct at approximate past times? Is it voodoo or science?

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[Ariarates]

I think all of these qualify as examples of "Absence of evidence isn't evcidence of absence".

Agree. Now go and find BoM horses or pigs. Or don't go and just keep saying that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If nobody is looking, this "argument" will hold indefinitely.

And the Lord began again to take the curse from off the land, and the house of Emer did prosper exceedingly under the reign of Emer; and in the space of sixty and two years they had become exceedingly strong, insomuch that they became exceedingly rich-- Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.

As far as the pigs are concerned, I think you need to distinguish between the domesticated species to which the BoM alludes and wild species like peccaries. Elsewhere I explained that domestication requires several characteristics which must all be present in a wild species. Peccaries, while very fun to watch (I saw a bunch this summer), are pretty aggressive little critters and cannot be domesticated. From the above quotation, the "swine" are lumped in with all kinds of domesticated animals so it is unlikely that this is a reference to a wild species that was hunted by the Jaredites - especially since the text distinguishes between "having" animals, indicative of domesticated animals, and "there being" animals, indicative of non-domesticable animals like elephants and, apparently, cureloms and cumoms.

[Zakuska]

Agree. Now go and find BoM horses or pigs. Or don't go and just keep saying that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If nobody is looking, this "argument" will hold indefinitely.

And the Lord began again to take the curse from off the land, and the house of Emer did prosper exceedingly under the reign of Emer; and in the space of sixty and two years they had become exceedingly strong, insomuch that they became exceedingly rich-- Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.

As far as the pigs are concerned, I think you need to distinguish between the domesticated species to which the BoM alludes and wild species like peccaries. Elsewhere I explained that domestication requires several characteristics which must all be present in a wild species. Peccaries, while very fun to watch (I saw a bunch this summer), are pretty aggressive little critters and cannot be domesticated. From the above quotation, the "swine" are lumped in with all kinds of domesticated animals so it is unlikely that this is a reference to a wild species that was hunted by the Jaredites - especially since the text distinguishes between "having" animals, indicative of domesticated animals, and "there being" animals, indicative of non-domesticable animals like elephants and, apparently, cureloms and cumoms.

And yet the "pigs" that my Uncle in-law in Brazil raises and I ate, look just like Peccarries.

[Ariarates]

And yet the "pigs" that my Uncle in-law in Brazil raises and I ate, look just like Peccarries.

You don't have to domesticate an animal before you can eat it. Catching & cooking it will do just fine. How do they taste, btw?

In discussions such as these, you need to distinguish between hunting, taming and domesticating. They are three different things. If you understand the difference, you also understand why the BoM is incorrect regarding the domestic animals it mentions.

[Zakuska]

You don't have to domesticate an animal before you can eat it. Catching & cooking it will do just fine. How do they taste, btw?

In discussions such as these, you need to distinguish between hunting, taming and domesticating. They are three different things. If you understand the difference, you also understand why the BoM is incorrect regarding the domestic animals it mentions.

He had them in a pen on his ranch and he raised them. No need to catch them. He went out one morning. Picked a young one. Cut it's throught and we had pig for lunch.

PS. Heres what a medical study done on feril pigs has to say of the domesticability of the peccary.

Although the collared peccary (Tayassu tajacu) is found throughout the Americas, with a high potential for domestication and commercial exploitation, there are few data on the reproductive biology of this mammalian species.

http://www.medscape....stract/19745218

Heres a man feeding one some melon in a pen, and its talking about their domestication. Another man has 3 in what looks to be his backyard. They look pretty domesticable to me.

http://ostasp.rizont...ls/peccary-book

Heres another site that lists them as domesticable,

+ Wild hog/ quenk/ collared peccary (Tayassu tajuacu).

http://ostasp.rizont...n/domestication

So do us all a favor and quit lecturing us on " why the BoM is incorrect regarding the domestic animals it mentions".

[Ariarates]

So do us all a favor and quit lecturing us on " why the BoM is incorrect regarding the domestic animals it mentions".

Relax dude, I don't think I violated any board rules.

I couldn't read your first reference (account required) but you provided a quote that says peccaries have "a high potential for domestication". Your second reference calls keeping peccaries "wildlife farming" and your third reference calls them "wild animal species" with "the potential for domestication". Looks like they aren't domesticated just yet. I suggest you overcome your aversion to being lectured and look up the difference between taming and domesticating.

Edit: it would be interesting to see if modern farmers will succeed where native Americans failed for 10,000+ years. My money is on the natives unless some very advanced technology like genetic engineering can be succesfully employed.

Edit 2: Here's an interesting article from 2005: Breeding wild pigs and peccaries in Brazil: unfulfilled potential.

[LeSellers]

Looks like they aren't domesticated just yet.

...

Edit: it would be interesting to see if modern farmers will succeed where native Americans failed for 10,000+ years. My money is on the natives unless some very advanced technology like genetic engineering can be succesfully employed.

Keep in mind that the Nephites were observant Jews (speaking of those from whom they came), and would not have continued domesticating any sort of "swine". That means that it is more than possible that the art of domestication of peccaries would have been lost along with the civilization of the Jaredites, when Ether wrote the tale of the last great battle of Shiz and Coriantumr.

All lost arts are not irretrievably so, but this one may easily have fallen victim to the Law of Moses.

Lehi

[handys003]

You don't have to domesticate an animal before you can eat it. Catching & cooking it will do just fine. How do they taste, btw?

In discussions such as these, you need to distinguish between hunting, taming and domesticating. They are three different things. If you understand the difference, you also understand why the BoM is incorrect regarding the domestic animals it mentions.

So does domesticating fish count? Shashimi anyone?

[Zakuska]

Keep in mind that the Nephites were observant Jews (speaking of those from whom they came), and would not have continued domesticating any sort of "swine". That means that it is more than possible that the art of domestication of peccaries would have been lost along with the civilization of the Jaredites, when Ether wrote the tale of the last great battle of Shiz and Coriantumr.

All lost arts are not irretrievably so, but this one may easily have fallen victim to the Law of Moses.

Lehi

Excellent point LeSellers.

Here's another... If it's such an " unfulfilled potential" as Ariartes claims... Why in the world are there so many commercial pig farms in Brazil registered to do just that? Ie Breed peccaries for food?

However, only 5% of the 452 registered commercial breeding farms in Brazil produce collared peccaries. Indeed, many attempts to produce this species have failed to date because of low economic return, the use of inadequate husbandry practices, and lack of knowledge of the social behavior of the species (NOGUEIRA et al., 1999; NOGUEIRA-FILHO et al., 1999).

http://pigtrop.cirad...ollared_peccary

Thats 23 pig farms that are commercially producing them. Maybe the US should be looking into domesticating all those wild pigs in the southern states that are causing so many problems.

I believe that constitutes a refutation of Ariarates's assertion here.

As far as the pigs are concerned, I think you need to distinguish between the domesticated species to which the BoM alludes and wild species like peccaries. Elsewhere I explained that domestication requires several characteristics which must all be present in a wild species. Peccaries, while very fun to watch (I saw a bunch this summer), are pretty aggressive little critters and cannot be domesticated. From the above quotation, the "swine" are lumped in with all kinds of domesticated animals so it is unlikely that this is a reference to a wild species that was hunted by the Jaredites - especially since the text distinguishes between "having" animals, indicative of domesticated animals, and "there being" animals, indicative of non-domesticable animals like elephants and, apparently, cureloms and cumoms.

So it is very plausible that the Peccaries (who have been in the Americas for millions of years) were indeed the "swine" domesticated by the Jaredites,and the ones there now days are actually decendants of feral Jaradite pigs.

[Ariarates]

However, only 5% of the 452 registered commercial breeding farms in Brazil produce collared peccaries.

(

[thesometimesaint]

Tarski:

A sample is a subject chosen from a population for investigation. A random sample is one chosen by a method involving an unpredictable component. Random sampling can also refer to taking a number of independent observations from the same probability distribution, without involving any real population. A probability sample is one in which each item has a known probability of being in the sample. It maybe a representative sample, but not a random sample.

The sample usually will not be completely representative of the population from which it was drawn

[thesometimesaint]

Ariarates:

Nice pictures, but I fail to see the correlation between fossils, and bodies left to the elements.

[Tarski]

Tarski:

A sample is a subject chosen from a population for investigation.

A sample is not necessarily or even usually a single member of the population but rather a subset of such. For example, car manufacturers test some random collection of say 100 cars from a lot of say 1000.

A random sample is one chosen by a method involving an unpredictable component.

Like shuffling cards or rolling die or more likely some more other method perhaps involving a random number generator.

The sample usually will not be completely representative of the population from which it was drawn