Could The Lamanites Really Have Disappeared

[MormonMason]

I agree that 'this land' most likely applies to their 'patch' - but many still read it as the full Americas (north and south continents).

I wonder whether the Wentworth letter fits a 'limited geography' 'this land' model? Or maybe Joseph didn't realise the internal geography contradicted what he saw in vision/was told by Moroni/presumed based on his own prejudice.

Joseph Smith was the first to suggest a limited geography. When he published the editorial in the Times and Seasons he cut the continent of South America out of the Book of Mormon picture. When Joseph Smith refers to "this continent" in the Wentworth Letter, he was referring to the Continent of North America, which includes Mexico and Central America. Again, he cut South America out of the picture because this editorial, published with his approval and highly likely written by him, placed Zarahemla and the Land Southward north of the Isthmus of Darien (Panama). Zarahemla was located in the Land Southward in the Book of Mormon. This made the narrow neck of land the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

This early limited geography does not fit a "this land" limited geography. Mexico and Central America were explicitly included in the editorial he published. "This land" theories exclude Mexico and Central America.

Having said that, you could still squeeze that statement into limited geography. If 'this continent' means the whole north and south then technically they could have been on it, just not on very much of it.

"This continent" leaves out the South American continent entirely, speaking of Book of Mormon times, consistent with the editorial he published in the Times and Seasons. South America is a separate continent from "this continent," although joined thereto by the Isthmus of Panama.

But, did members of the Church pay attention to such things in the official Church Newspapers of the period? Unfortunately, that included even some of the leaders of the Church in the early period of the Church. In fairness to them, however, they often were in other regions and countries and did not have the option of reading the official newspapers of the Church, so I suppose I can cut them a little slack.

By the way, that's nearly 171 years.

Edited May 27, 2013 by MormonMason

[Robert F. Smith]

I agree that 'this land' most likely applies to their 'patch' - but many still read it as the full Americas (north and south continents).

I wonder whether the Wentworth letter fits a 'limited geography' 'this land' model? Or maybe Joseph didn't realise the internal geography contradicted what he saw in vision/was told by Moroni/presumed based on his own prejudice.

Having said that, you could still squeeze that statement into limited geography. If 'this continent' means the whole north and south then technically they could have been on it, just not on very much of it.

I think you are correct about their "patch."

And a good quote from Brother Joseph. Since he had no training in anthropology, and no sense of perspective on what the "continent" (singular) might entail, any vision he might see (and his description indicates some detail) would necessarily be geographically opaque to him. It is a vision of past glories and of a civilization like nothing he could see among local Amerinds. His interpretations would be no better than some of those being bandied about nowadays by untrained Mormons who can see "Cumorah" behind every woodland tree -- with the best of intentions.

[MormonMason]

...

When I'm back 'with my books' I'll check whether my 1991 edition of Mormon Doctrine retains the statement by Elder McConkie about it.

...

I just happen to have checked the electronic copy I have in LDS Library 2006 (containing the 2nd edition of Mormon Doctrine dated 1966). Here is what he wrote about the American Indians:

The American Indians, however, as Columbus found them also had other blood than that of Israel in their veins. It is possible that isolated remnants of the Jaredites may have lived through the period of destruction in which millions of their fellows perished. It is quite apparent that groups of orientals found their way over the Bering Strait and gradually moved southward to mix with the Indian peoples. We have records of a colony of Scandinavians attempting to set up a settlement in America some 500 years before Columbus. There are archeological indications that an unspecified number of groups of people probably found their way from the old to the new world in pre-Columbian times. Out of all these groups would have come the American Indians as they were discovered in the 15th century.

(Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2d ed., p.33; as cited from LDS Library 2006; bold emphasis mine)

That was about 47 years ago, and a bit more than your 30 to 40 years ago. Even with this book you in part blame for members' problems, admixture from several sources, named and unnamed, resulted in the current American Indians--according to Bruce R. McConkie.

Edited to add: I just checked a Google Books snippet view of page 31 of the first edition of Mormon Doctrine, published in 1958, and found the text mention the same admixture pretty much as in the 1966 edition. (Just alter the search parameter with different single words from the above quote and you will see most of the text from that page as you do that). Ahem...make that nearly 55 years.

Edited May 27, 2013 by MormonMason

[canard78]

Dallin H. Oaks was not a General Authority in the 1940s so I would not apply it to him. How many times have the Brethren asked members of the Church to read the Church magazines? When members fail to do so and instead invest their money in reprinted and out of date anthologies (much like Evangelicals do with republishing texts going back to the 19th century and relying upon them as though no other text matters) that often were written when individuals were not even Presidents of the Church, of from non-official sources such as the Journal of Discourses, then does not the fault reside squarely in the laps of the general membership of the Church? Please explain why not if you think not?

As to Mormon Doctrine, mine collects dust even when I am home with my books.

And, I don't have a problem with fallibility of leaders, either. It is a non-issue for me. It still does not detract from what I have written. If members did as the Brethren asked, and read the magazines of the Church, they would have been exposed to concepts relating to limited hemispheric geographies as well as to a great many other subjects that critics of the Church falsely claim the Church has hidden from them and suppressed!

What does Elder Oaks have to do with the post you replied to? I think you're mixing posts up. Elder Oaks was used as an example of 'general membership' who discovered the limited geography 'idea' at BYU but had previously thought otherwise.

The other posts were offered not as proof that NY is the right location but that people who are leaders still taught this despite a few obscure Ensign articles that they also had access to. The idea was obviously not clear enough to the likes of apostles speaking in conference or Elder McConkie writing his book.

[canard78]

Thanks for that wonderful assemblage of statements supporting a Cumorah in New York position (to be sung to Alfred Newman's music and Ken Darby's lyrics: "When it's Cumorah in New York"). You are as good as any apologist for a position as I have ever seen. As has long been noted, parallels and arguments for a position are only as good as the balance provided by contrary statements and parallels.

Bother, (faux) compliment for a position I wasn't even defending.

If there's a historical location for the Book of Mormon I don't believe for a moment that it's upstate New York. No way.

I was only sharing those (and they were a big copy-paste dump from another website) to show that other people in senior leadership (even until the 2nd half of the 20th C) firmly believed NY was the setting for the BoM.

The assertion from MM was that if people had just been reading their Ensigns they'd know that it's not viable for NY but actually mesoamerica. I simply wanted to point out that senior leaders, in spite of apparent copious statements through the century in the Ensign to the contrary, had continued to teach a NY geography. I don't believe in it, but I can see why some, even now, reach that conclusion.

[canard78]

I just happen to have checked the electronic copy I have in LDS Library 2006 (containing the 2nd edition of Mormon Doctrine dated 1966). Here is what he wrote about the American Indians:

That was about 47 years ago, and a bit more than your 30 to 40 years ago. Even with this book you in part blame for members' problems, admixture from several sources, named and unnamed, resulted in the current American Indians--according to Bruce R. McConkie.

Edited to add: I just checked a Google Books snippet view of page 31 of the first edition of Mormon Doctrine, published in 1958, and found the text mention the same admixture pretty much as in the 1966 edition. (Just alter the search parameter with different single words from the above quote and you will see most of the text from that page as you do that). Ahem...make that nearly 55 years.

Thanks, I'd already clarified my 30-40 years statement to Calmoriah but appreciate the extra information. None of that statement goes against a hemispheric model though, but does at least give room to dismiss an empty continent model fairly early on (there were still in 1990s (probably are still) Mormons in good standing who always read their Ensign who still believe in an empty continent model).

What does the 2006 digital version say about NY Cumorah? Is it still giving the statement about it being the BoM setting or have they corrected that 'misinformation?'

[Questing Beast]

Actually every one of your assumptions here is false. mtDNA and Y-chromosome distinctions are old hat now, as Southerton tried to point out to you. Now we take the entire genome and distinguish minute contributions from long ago. Indeed, one can even date the approximate era from which certain contributions come.

However, Southerton wants to have his cake and eat it too (a common problem on this board) in falsely claiming that the Book of Mormon is about all the Amerinds and their ancestors who have ever existed in the Western Hemisphere. I'd like to see him debate this issue within anthropological reality. If his position is so strong, why doesn't he do that?

Southerton pointed out nothing to me, because I don't read Southerton.

A late friend of mine used to twist my ears over the mtDNA studies going on. I just read Perego's paper. He says: "Since neither the Book of Mormon nor church doctrine indicates that all Native Americans descend from the Book of Mormon people, the critics' arguments are on a weak footing at the outset." Yet we have D&C quotes already stating, from the Lord no less, that the Lamanites are all around where the Saints live, i.e. are understood clearly enough to be "Native Americans" without exceptions or distinctions. This was the understanding of JS, et al. of those times. Only recent genetic studies show the dominant DNA in virtually all Native Americans to originate from ancient migrations from Asia. So, critics are not arguing from a "weak footing at the outset".

Any Mormon understanding of the modern research going on has to be "revisionist" compared to the D&C passages and early church members' understanding of what constituted "Lamanites". All of those early assumptions are unsupportable by modern study. In fact they are contradicted by modern study into genetic tracing....

[thesometimesaint]

"If a small family of Middle Eastern Jews mixed with American Indians 2-3,000 years ago, the Jewish nuclear DNA would spread throughout the adjacent populations like a drop of ink in a bucket of water. It would have spread through neighbouring populations, be very unlikely to go extinct and scientists exploring the genomes of Native Americans would stumble on it....if it was there. "

Is Simon wrong?

Yes. For a variety of reasons. The Lehites weren't Jews. They were admixtures of local populations in ancient Israel and later American populations. Most times it was a religio-political distinction without reference to biological parentage at all. We don't know who or where those neighboring populations were.

If you don't know what to look for or where to look it is highly improbable that you're going to find it.

Edited May 27, 2013 by thesometimesaint

[Calm]

(and they were a big copy-paste dump from another website)

As a side note, board rules are when you copy others' work which includes assembling quotes, you should give a reference to give them credit for their effort as well as allow people to see the ultimate context they are presented in.

[Calm]

(there were still in 1990s (probably are still) Mormons in good standing who always read their Ensign who still believe in an empty continent model).

Sometimes when we have set in our mind a specific idea, it doesn't occur to us to read material in a different way even when it is obvious to others that it should be...habits, including ones of thought, can be hard to break for a variety of reasons.

[bdouglas]

I won't have time to read previous posts on this thread but here is my two-bits.....

The BOM says that a "remnant of the seed of Joseph will survive"--or this is what Lehi is promised. What is a "remnant"? I think it is what we're seeing in the DNA studies of Simon Southerton and others like him, i.e., Nephite and Lamanite DNA in current samples is next to invisible, or non-existent.

(Anybody who sets out to scientifically prove the BOM true is headed for trouble anyway, whether it is Thomas Stuart Ferguson or Simon Southerton.)

Edited May 27, 2013 by bdouglas

[canard78]

As a side note, board rules are when you copy others' work which includes assembling quotes, you should give a reference to give them credit for their effort as well as allow people to see the ultimate context they are presented in.

Thanks. I'd normally do so but the website I found them on wasn't a particularly positive site and I didn't want to send them more traffic. I'd usually go and 'refind' them on official sources but was on my phone which is a bit tricky. I'll bear it in mind in future. I'm aware that the nature of the website and the objective of their article meant the quotes were highly selective. But they are still genuine quotes and have read many of them before in other places (including fair).

[CA Steve]

I won't have time to read previous posts on this thread but here is my two-bits.....

The BOM says that a "remnant of the seed of Joseph will survive"--or this is what Lehi is promised. What is a "remnant"? I think it is what we're seeing in the DNA studies of Simon Southerton and others like him, i.e., Nephite and Lamanite DNA in current samples is next to invisible, or non-existent.

(Anybody who sets out to scientifically prove the BOM true is headed for trouble anyway, whether it is Thomas Stuart Ferguson or Simon Southerton.)

I may be reading Simon's blog differently but it seems to me he is saying that regardless of what the Lehite DNA looked like, advances in DNA studies enable scientist to detect a tiny foreign DNA infusion into a native population.

From his blog.

"Genetic tests are now so sensitive, that it is possible to detect a tiny fraction of a percent of mixed ancestry in a person’s DNA."

I realize this does not answer a lot of the questions, but it seems to address the point of needing to know what Lehite DNA looked like.

Edited May 28, 2013 by CA Steve

[Helen47]

Something of interest

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000829

[Calm]

Thanks. I'd normally do so but the website I found them on wasn't a particularly positive site and I didn't want to send them more traffic. I'd usually go and 'refind' them on official sources but was on my phone which is a bit tricky

I do the same when I get into that situation....

[Calm]

I realize this does not answer a lot of the questions, but it seems to address the point of needing to know what Lehite DNA looked like.

But doesn't that only address differences found and not the source of the differences? What if one doesn't have an original "Lehite DNA" to compare any other DNA to? How would one tell what the source was...or wasn't?

[CA Steve]

But doesn't that only address differences found and not the source of the differences? What if one doesn't have an original "Lehite DNA" to compare any other DNA to? How would one tell what the source was...or wasn't?

I believe the implication is that they have determined there was no Middle Eastern infusion of any type in the samples studied (which renders the question of Lehite DNA or Jaredite DNA moot) during the time Lehi or the Jaredites were supposed to arrive in the Americas.

Here are the pertinent parts from Simon’s blog. Please read them in their context on his blog to get a better understanding of what he is saying.

"The research on Neanderthals and Denisovans clearly illustrates that if ancestors of other ethnic backgrounds are hiding unnoticed in our family trees, traces of their DNA can be found in our genomes. Even after many thousands of years"

"Using ancestry informative SNPs it is possible to estimate how long ago foreign DNA entered a population."

"If a small family of Middle Eastern Jews mixed with American Indians 2-3,000 years ago, the Jewish nuclear DNA would spread throughout the adjacent populations like a drop of ink in a bucket of water. It would have spread through neighboring populations, be very unlikely to go extinct and scientists exploring the genomes of Native Americans would stumble on it....if it was there."

[MormonMason]

You still have to have a baseline for comparison. We have such a baseline (which still is hotly debated, mind you) in the cases of Denisovan and Neanderthalian nDNA. We do not have such a baseline as of yet for the nDNA of Jacob himself or of his first line descendants.

[MormonMason]

Something of interest

http://www.plosone.o...al.pone.0000829

While interesting, mtDNAs are useless in determining "Jewishness."

[CA Steve]

You still have to have a baseline for comparison. We have such a baseline (which still is hotly debated, mind you) in the cases of Denisovan and Neanderthalian nDNA. We do not have such a baseline as of yet for the nDNA of Jacob himself or of his first line descendants.

Maybe I am misreading Simon, but I believe he is saying they havn't found an infusion of DNA at all in that time period. If they had an unidentified infusion of some sort, then the questions of comparrisons would be valid. Since they have detected no infusion at all, then there is nothing to compare, nor is there a need to have one.

[thesometimesaint]

I believe the implication is that they have determined there was no Middle Eastern infusion of any type in the samples studied (which renders the question of Lehite DNA or Jaredite DNA moot) during the time Lehi or the Jaredites were supposed to arrive in the Americas.

Here are the pertinent parts from Simon’s blog. Please read them in their context on his blog to get a better understanding of what he is saying.

"The research on Neanderthals and Denisovans clearly illustrates that if ancestors of other ethnic backgrounds are hiding unnoticed in our family trees, traces of their DNA can be found in our genomes. Even after many thousands of years"

"Using ancestry informative SNPs it is possible to estimate how long ago foreign DNA entered a population."

"If a small family of Middle Eastern Jews mixed with American Indians 2-3,000 years ago, the Jewish nuclear DNA would spread throughout the adjacent populations like a drop of ink in a bucket of water. It would have spread through neighboring populations, be very unlikely to go extinct and scientists exploring the genomes of Native Americans would stumble on it....if it was there."

One. The Lehites weren't Jews.

Two. We have no idea as to what Jewish DNA looks like.

Three. We have no doctrine of whom or where those neighbors were.

Four. It doesn't allow for genetic bottle necks.

Five. It would be more like a drop of ink in a large lake of water.

Six. Even if there.There is no way to tell if what we see is what it is claimed to be.

Seven. Most of the Book of Mormon deals with the religio-political sentiment of the Nephites, and isn't concerned with the genetic makeup of the founders.

[grhammjr]

has there been any DNA studies of America's Mulungeon people and the Lamanites.

[bu11fr0g]

Simon never was a human geneticist and frequently makes great errors in his interpretations. He is wrong about small pieces being evident in genomic dna. In contradistinction, genetic evidence identities identified to date are not consistent with a middle eastern origen.

[Robert F. Smith]

Bother, (faux) compliment for a position I wasn't even defending.

If there's a historical location for the Book of Mormon I don't believe for a moment that it's upstate New York. No way.

I was only sharing those (and they were a big copy-paste dump from another website) to show that other people in senior leadership (even until the 2nd half of the 20th C) firmly believed NY was the setting for the BoM.

The assertion from MM was that if people had just been reading their Ensigns they'd know that it's not viable for NY but actually mesoamerica. I simply wanted to point out that senior leaders, in spite of apparent copious statements through the century in the Ensign to the contrary, had continued to teach a NY geography. I don't believe in it, but I can see why some, even now, reach that conclusion.

Sorry for misunderstanding the thrust of that assemblage in your overall picture, but thanks for that treasury of remarks.

[Robert F. Smith]

Southerton pointed out nothing to me, because I don't read Southerton.

That's why I said "tried." Your failure to read him was obvious.

A late friend of mine used to twist my ears over the mtDNA studies going on. I just read Perego's paper. He says: "Since neither the Book of Mormon nor church doctrine indicates that all Native Americans descend from the Book of Mormon people, the critics' arguments are on a weak footing at the outset." Yet we have D&C quotes already stating, from the Lord no less, that the Lamanites are all around where the Saints live, i.e. are understood clearly enough to be "Native Americans" without exceptions or distinctions. This was the understanding of JS, et al. of those times. Only recent genetic studies show the dominant DNA in virtually all Native Americans to originate from ancient migrations from Asia. So, critics are not arguing from a "weak footing at the outset".

Any Mormon understanding of the modern research going on has to be "revisionist" compared to the D&C passages and early church members' understanding of what constituted "Lamanites". All of those early assumptions are unsupportable by modern study. In fact they are contradicted by modern study into genetic tracing....

"genetic tracing"?

In his article on the Lamanites in the Encyclopaedia of Mormonism (Macmillan), Gordon C. Thomasson pointed out that the designation is used in the Church (in D&C and in assumptions by leaders) as a generic reference to Amerinds, since it has been so long since the demise of the Nephites, and (as many population geneticists have pointed out) since the the spread of some minuscule portion of Lamanite genes throughout the Americas and even Polynesia is a foregone conclusion. It is only in that sense that one can speak of Lamanites as though they are identical to Amerinds.

Edited May 30, 2013 by Robert F. Smith