Does DNA evidence refute the Book of Mormon?

Has DNA testing of Native Americans proven the Book of Mormon to be false? I argue that DNA testing does challenge some common but faulty assumptions some LDS people have made about the Book of Mormon, but does not jeopardize the text itself. The findings of modern science, though often tentative, can be welcomed and need not be feared by those who treasure the Book of Mormon as ancient scripture from the New World and as another testament of Jesus Christ.

I explore these issues from a variety of angles, seeking to provide documentation to let you check my analysis for yourself. This work is my responsibility and does not necessarily reflect official views of the Church. Updated Feb. 9, 2009. Copyright © 2002-2009 by Jeff Lindsay.

Table of Contents

Dr. Michael Whiting on the DNA Controversy

Dr. Michael F. Whiting, a prominent geneticist whose work has received widespread attention (it was featured as the cover story in cover article in Nature in mid-January 2003), recently gave a lecture at BYU entitled, "Does DNA Evidence Refute the Authenticity of the Book of Mormon?: Responding to the Critics." Please watch the video presentation.

He also has an excellent article, "DNA and the Book of Mormon: A Phylogenetic Perspective" in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Nov. 2003.)

 

Mormanity is my LDS blog, in operation since 2004. DNA issues have been discussed frequently there.

Also consider my "Book of Mormon Evidences" page.

You can order a free copy of the Book of Mormon at Mormon.org.

Pre-Columbian Chickens and Missing Human Polynesian DNA in the Americas

Some Mormons have been intrigued by recent news about the discovery of pre-Columbian chickens in the Americas (the peer-reviewed scientific article in is also available online). While it isn't directly related to the Book of Mormon, there are some interesting implications, as I discuss in a post at Mormanity. While there is strong evidence for significant ancient contact between Polynesia and the Americas, DNA studies of Native Americans do not (yet) show evidence of such contact. That may help us better appreciate the limitations of DNA analysis.

2010 Update

So many misunderstandings of the DNA-Book of Mormon issue derive from misunderstanding what the Book of Mormon says. Part of this misunderstanding involves the issue of geography and scope of the Book of Mormon. As Book of Mormon students increasingly understand that the Book of Mormon actually describes a very limited geographical area in its accounts, and as they increasingly recognize that Mesoamerica (southern Mexico, Guatemala, and surrounding territory) offers the best candidate for the setting of the Book of Mormon, they also recognize that the DNA attacks on the Book of Mormon have very limited impact when the text is properly understood. Our critics have accused us of backpedaling, revisionism, and a desperate retreat in favoring a limited geography instead of the once common but sloppy hemispheric model for the Book of Mormon (where South America was the "land southward" and North America was the "land northward," Panama was the narrow neck, and Lamanites were battling Nephites across thousands of miles of territory, and where the whole continent had nothing but pure Israelite genes--none of which is supported by the text!). But they are simply wrong. While the Church has never taken an official position on the geography of the Book of Mormon (contrary to errant insinuations or claims of some people peddling errant models centered in North America), we can look to Joseph Smith himself for the idea that Mesoamerica might be considered as the land of the Nephites, and apparently even for the idea that Zarahemla, in the "land southward," might be north of Panama in Mesoamerica. The DNA debate is best understood by understanding the origins and history of the Limited Geography Model of the Book of Mormon. Recent contributions in understanding these topics comes from John Tvedtnes' excellent article, "A Brief History of the Limited Geographic View of the Book of Mormon." Equally valuable is Ted Dee Stoddard's "Joseph Smith and John Lloyd Stephens," which shows the impact that a Mesoamerican explorer had on Joseph Smith's understanding of the Book of Mormon and its geography - over a decade after the text was published. It provides insights into what Joseph Smith said or approved of saying in the LDS publication, Times and Seasons, during the time when Joseph acted as its editor. It's a fascinating story worth careful consideration.

Some of the confusion over the DNA issue has been compounded by some LDS folks advocating Book of Mormon geography models focused on the present United States as the primary setting for the ancient Nephites. For those interested, a number of resources have been compiled by the Book of Mormon Archeology Foundation showing the obvious problems with the so-called Heartland Model, as I discuss in my Jan. 2010 post at Mormanity, "Away from the Heartland: Joseph Smith, John Lloyd Stephens, and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon."

Short Summary

If you follow Mormon-related news, you may have encountered the publicity about a Mormon bishop who left the Church because of DNA evidence, or the story of a Mormon scientist who has publicly taught that DNA evidence disproves the Book of Mormon. Christian ministries now distribute videos and brochures claiming that DNA evidence disproves the Book of Mormon. Many web sites proclaim the death of the Book of Mormon, slain by a bullet of DNA. What's going on?

Recent Common Ancestors?

In 2004, the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, published an article suggesting that humans share a common ancestor only a few thousand years ago (Rohde et al., 2004). It is based on an improved statistical model that takes into account how genes flow through marriage and travel. Though it has some flaws, it makes a valuable contribution - and has been the subject of much publicity).

Here is the beginning of the paper:

If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. However, the random mating model ignores essential aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups. Here we show that recent common ancestors also emerge from two models incorporating substantial population substructure. One model, designed for simplicity and theoretical insight, yields explicit mathematical results through a probabilistic analysis. A more elaborate second model, designed to capture historical population dynamics in a more realistic way, is analysed computationally through Monte Carlo simulations. These analyses suggest that the genealogies of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past. In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models. Moreover, among all individuals living more than just a few thousand years earlier than the MRCA, each present-day human has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors.

Please note that finding a common ancestor is a much easier task--and one that requires less digging into the past--than finding a common ancestor along purely maternal or purely paternal lines, the kind that are analyzed using mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome tests.

The implication for the book of Mormon, as I discuss below, is that it is entirely possible for the majority of Native Americans to be direct descendents of Lehi with some of his DNA, even though there may not be anyone with his Y-chromosome or with Sariah's mitochondrial DNA. Lehi may be a common ancestor for most Native Americans without requiring that they all have clearly discernible "Jewish DNA."

The Book of Mormon has come under heavy fire from critics in light of DNA evidence that is said to refute the Book of Mormon, for the evidence points to Asiatic origins, not Middle Eastern origins of the ancient inhabitants of this continent. Since "everyone knows" that the Book of Mormon teaches that ancient Middle Easterners were the primary ancestors of modern Native Americans, doesn't their Asiatic heritage destroy any case for the plausibility of the Book of Mormon? Absolutely yes, according to many of our critics.

These attacks typically rely on several faulty assumptions about what the Book of Mormon actually states. In fact, the DNA evidence does not refute the claims of the text itself, nor does it preclude a divine origin for the Book of Mormon. DNA evidence has relatively little to do with the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, but does provide importance tentative insights into the origins of many ancient American peoples. The DNA does help refute the unjustified and long criticized but popular idea that the Book of Mormon describes the origins of ALL Native Americans and covers the entire hemisphere in its scope. It was silly and easily attacked long before the DNA evidence came out, but it was a popular misunderstanding that was shared even by some Church leaders. Sorry, it just doesn't fly.

Further, it's important to note that the Book of Mormon does not lead us to expect that the peoples it describes should have DNA that we could recognize today as "Jewish" DNA or even non-Asiatic DNA. Of the various men and women in three different Old World groups who came to the Americas according to the Book of Mormon, we can only safely state that one of them, Mulek, was definitely Jewish, but we still do not know what kind of DNA he carried. Lehi was somehow descended from Manasseh, but that does not specify what kind of Y-chromosome he had. We have no clue about the genetic origins of his wife or the other individuals that came with him. We know nothing about the genetic origins of others in Mulek's party or the people they almost certainly intermarried with in the Americas. We know nothing about the Jaredites, though they probably originated from Central Asia (the possibly Asiatic origins of the Jaredites were being discussed by Hugh Nibley and others decades before modern DNA testing came on the scene). The DNA they contributed to the Americas could have looked like Asiatic DNA. Given the uncertainty in the genetic origins of the groups mentioned in the Book of Mormon, one cannot accurately claim that genetic evidence has somehow disproved the Book of Mormon (see my article, "Why Should We Expect to Find Jewish DNA in Native Americans?" and the May 2004 article by David Stewart, "DNA and the Book of Mormon"). DNA attacks on the Book of Mormon ultimately boil down to erroneous logic and flawed assumptions, as Blake Ostler has shown in his article, "Assessing the Logical Structure of DNA Arguments against the Book of Mormon" [Ostler, 2004].

As mentioned above, the DNA-related attacks generally assume that the Book of Mormon teaches that the ONLY ancient peoples in the Americas came from the three migrations mentioned in the text (the Jaredites, Lehi's group, and Mulek's group), and that Book of Mormon lands cover the whole hemisphere. Serious students of the Book of Mormon have recognized for many years--long before the DNA controversy--that such assumptions are unjustified. The Book of Mormon deals with a few groups of people in a small geographical area, and does not exclude the possibility of many others being present in North and South America. There is significant internal evidence in the Book of Mormon for the presence of many people in Book of Mormon lands who were not primarily descended from Lehi's group. If Lehi landed on a continent already populated with millions of people of Asiatic origin, this would not be inconsistent with the Book of Mormon. But what genetic evidence of Lehi's arrival would we expect to see today, if the genes of Lehi's group represented a minute fraction of ancient American peoples? And what genetic evidence of Lehi's arrival should we be looking for, given that we don't know the genetic composition of that group? (For additional indirect insight on this issue, see the Sept. 2004 news stories about previously missed evidence of ancient Australian immigrants to the Americas that I posted on my Mormanity blog.)

In my view, the DNA-based attacks on the Book of Mormon are rather unscientific, though they are dressed in counterfeit robes of scientific objectivity. The scientific weakness in the DNA attacks is clearly illustrated in the November 2003 issue of The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies published by The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. This volume offers four excellent articles from scholars, including a couple of DNA scientists, on the issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon. Many of their conclusions are similar to ones that I have reached here, but they provide many additional insights that I highly recommend considering. These articles are:

Note: All four of the above articles plus a PDF version of this essay (the Nov. 16, 2003 version) are now available on the "DNA and the Book of Mormon" page. My article is posted at http://www.lds.org/newsroom/files/jeff_lindsay_dna.pdf. One advantage of using the LDS.org version of this page is that it includes a table of contents with page numbers for more convenient use when printed out.

Genetic data do point to an Asian origin for much of the genetic matter in the ancient Americas, and challenge some popular misconceptions about what the Book of Mormon teaches. But as we shall see below, the scientific evidence is not necessarily incompatible with the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon simply does not require that "Jewish" genetic markers should be found throughout Native Americans, contrary to the claims of several vocal critics. When the claims of the text are clearly understood, the scientific findings pertaining to DNA do not pose any serious challenge to those who accept the Book of Mormon and also respect the findings of science. In fact, the scientific details about the DNA evidence leave plenty of room for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

One important detail is that there is evidence of genes in Native Americans that may have come from sources other than northeastern Asia, such as the Middle East. Many of the DNA-related attacks on the Book of Mormon misrepresent scientific findings by falsely claiming that Native American DNA originated solely from Asia. While Asia appears to be the leading source of ancient immigrants to the Americas, there is plenty of room for additional groups coming to the continent, and several studies have found evidence for non-Asian DNA that cannot be explained by modern European admixture. These are discussed in below in the section entitled, "Throwing out the Pearl with the Oyster Shell: The Likelihood of Discarding the Most Interesting Evidence." The bottom line is that the "Asia only" model of ancient migration to the Americas is clearly incomplete.

Critics charge that genetic evidence refutes the Book of Mormon, which reports a migration of a group of people from Israel to the New World in 600 B.C. But mitochondrial DNA analysis shows that haplogroup X is found in both Israel and the New World (Morell, 1998; Brown et al, 1998; Forster et al., 1996; Highfield, 2000). The problem is that the estimated date of entry of haplogroup X in the New World is many thousands of years before 600 B.C., but that dating is based on an assumed mutation rate that has been shown to be many times slower than actually occurs in modern humans (Parsons et al., 1997; see also Ivanov et al., 1996; Denver, 2000; Howell et al., 1996; Pitman, 2003). A more reasonable mutation rate based on actual measurements in humans could allow for a time frame consistent with the Book of Mormon. Of course, this is an area where more information is still needed.

The evidence from mitochondrial DNA, passed on by mothers only, is supplemented by evidence from Y-chromosomes, which are passed on by fathers only. Native American Y-chromosomes show a variety of haplogroups, including haplogroups 4 and 1C (Karafet et al., 1999), which are also characteristic of Jewish peoples (Hammer et al., 2000). Haplogroup 1C is common enough in the New World that it has been proposed as a major founder haplogroup for the New World. Karafet is one of the co-authors in Hammer et al. (2000), and his 1999 paper is cited there, making me confident that they are talking about the same haplogroup 1C.

The DNA evidence can be at least partially explained by migrations from Asia, but the point is that DNA evidence DOES NOT rule out the Book of Mormon, at least not when the actual claims of the text are examined. DNA evidence may not be compatible with some errant assumptions that many Latter-day Saints have made about New World peoples and the Book of Mormon--natural assumptions made in the absence of scientific data and divine revelation regarding other peoples who have inhabited the New World. But this is no reason to reject the Book of Mormon. In fact, there is much fascinating evidence supporting its authenticity as an ancient record.

One should also note that even if more direct evidences of Jewish/European origins were to be found in DNA evidence, it would likely be assumed to be due to modern admixture rather than due to pre-Columbian sources, which I discuss at length below. In fact, contrary to some anti-Mormon claims, it is not impossible to find genes characteristic of Jewish ancestry among some Native Americans, and while these may generally be due to modern mixing with European Jews, how can one be sure of that? One example is given by Carvajal-Carmona et al. (2000), who discuss the presence of several indicators of Jewish ancestry among the Antioquian population of Colombia. These genes are believed to be due to Sephardic Jews who came to the Americas with the Spaniards, but it is very difficult to prove that conclusively.

In fact, the mathematics of genetic mixing (see discussion below) imply that there should be "Semitic DNA" among Native Americas. According to Steve Olson in the highly acclaimed book, Mapping Human History (2002a, p. 114):

The forces of genetic mixing are so powerful that everyone in the world has Jewish ancestors, though the amount of DNA from those ancestors in a given individual may be small. In fact, everyone on earth is by now a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and Aaron--if indeed they existed.
Every Native American may literally be a descendent of Abraham and even Lehi, but a vast number of other ancient ancestors who also contributed their genes may make it difficult to find the remnants of Semitic DNA. This does not destroy the plausibility of the Book of Mormon, when fairly and accurately read.

Significant evidence of pre-Columbian Middle Eastern and European genes entering the Americas is offered by analysis of human lymphocyte antigens (HLAs), as James L. Guthrie has shown (2000/2001) using extensive HLA data compiled by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994). The HLA genes code for the histocompatibility antigens on the surfaces of many cells. HLA type is used to match individuals for organ donation (e.g., bone marrow transplants). Unlike mtDNA and Y chromosomes, HLA genes are not passed on only along purely maternal or paternal lines, possibly making it easier for minority genes to persist. While the HLA data do not contradict the possibility that Native American genes overwhelmingly came from Asia, there are small amounts of genes that appear to provide evidence for the pre-Columbian entry of other groups in ways that I suggest are consistent with Book of Mormon claims. There is evidence for pre-Columbian migrations from Europe and Middle East that may be compatible with Book of Mormon claims, for example. I discuss Guthrie's article in more detail below.

Critics may rage about God's purported failure to reveal complete scientific information to modern prophets. How could God let a true prophet understand something incompletely? I believe that God's revelations are intended to teach people what is needed for salvation. If a prophet were to mistakenly think that a bat was a bird, a mistake Moses may have made (based on Deut. 14:7,18), then can we accuse that prophet of having led people to damnation? Not really. It's a detail of minor importance--at least of minor importance for the purposes behind the Book of Deuteronomy. When later scientific information reveals that bats are mammals, not birds, we can take several approaches in responding, such as:

  1. Reject Moses and the Bible, and write anti-Biblical essays to lead as many people as possible away from Bible.
  2. Rejoice that God has now revealed more complete information, through the medium of science, that can help us better understand details of our world and of the Biblical record.
  3. Demand that secular science no longer be taught in schools, since we know from the Bible that bats are birds. End of story.
I choose approach #2. In my opinion, the other two approaches are scripturally and scientifically immature, being two sides of the same coin. Both assume or require that the Bible be absolutely free of apparent problems. When possible evidence for a problem is presented, the immature response is simply to either deny the Bible or deny the evidence. Anyone attempting to resolve the two are dismissed as being apologists or corrupters of the word. To gain real knowledge, we must be prepared to dig into things as they are and not rely on grade-school level aphorisms to make sweeping conclusions. (For further background, see my essay, "Questions about Science and Mormon Doctrine.")

Recognize that prophets are mortal. Though they are inspired by God on many matters pertaining to our salvation, God does not replace 100% of their brain with new matter upon being called as prophet. I believe that they maintain their knowledge and understanding of things until God sees fit to provide new knowledge. Everything from their use of grammar to their preference of football teams to their understanding of ancient American history and the genetic makeup of indigenous peoples will be subject to their past education and experience. Biases, misconceptions, and limitations in understanding need not suddenly morph into perfect omniscience once they are called as prophets.

We can look forward to future revelations to help us better understand the history of mankind upon the earth and the details of God's creations. We can expect that true advances in scientific understanding will ultimately help us better appreciate God's creations and better understand the scriptures. Advances in knowledge have already done much to strengthen our appreciation of the Book of Mormon (consider, for example, the rich understanding that has come through investigations of the geography of the Arabian peninsula relative to Nephi's account, as discussed on my Book of Mormon Evidences Page). Further advances may challenge our assumptions about some things, but we should welcome all the light and knowledge that God sees fit to bestow upon us--recognizing, of course, that the scientific "truths" of any era have often been discarded or revised in light of later advances, so a degree of caution and patience is always advisable. And we must not make the mistake of letting the tentative and often incomplete or errant proclamations of men weaken our faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. In spite of my own lack of knowledge, I am proud to stand as a witness for the truthfulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and for the divine reality of the Book of Mormon as a testament of Jesus Christ.

That's the short summary. What follows is my more in-depth response, where I explore a variety of details.

Introduction: The DNA Challenge for the Book of Mormon To the index at the top

The issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon has raised many questions and some inappropriately harsh attacks by critics. Sadly, I even know of one person who claims to have left the Church because the preliminary DNA evidence did not square with his expectations. Still in its infancy, the application of DNA analysis to ancient history has posed tough new questions for those who believe in the Book of Mormon, just as it poses tough new questions for those who believe in the Bible--and for those who "believe" in linguistics, anthropology, and other sciences. DNA evidence is forcing many old assumptions to be reevaluated, but is also causing genuine head-scratching as it sometimes seems at odds with reasonable conclusions drawn from other fields.

The Recent Murphy Controversy

Thomas Murphy has received well-orchestrated national attention for his critique of the Book of Mormon based on DNA evidence. He is posing as a Galileo, an objective scholar being persecuted by an oppressive church. But the reality is much different, as Allen Wyatt shows in his review of Murphy's actions and inconsistencies at FAIRLDS.org. Given Murphy's active support of those who openly claim that they seek to "tear down" the Church, and given his open attacks on many aspects of Church doctrine, I suggest that the possibility of his excommunication has nothing to do with a scholar's honest questioning of LDS beliefs.

To counter some errors in the media about the DNA controversy, the LDS.org website now has a "DNA and the Book of Mormon" page with several articles as unofficial background material--including a PDF version of this essay (the Nov. 16, 2003 version) that I created for their use. My article is posted at lds.org/newsroom/files/jeff_lindsay_dna.pdf.

A concise and thoughtful summary of the real problem behind those who lose their faith over the DNA issue is given by Kevin Barney in "A Brief Review of Murphy and Southerton's 'Galileo Event'" at FAIRLDS.org. Barney responds to an article by Thomas Murphy and Simon Southerton, "Genetic Research a 'Galileo Event' for Mormons," Anthropology News, Vol. 44, No. 2 (February 2003): 20, a publication of the American Anthropological Association. Also see the compilation of DNA-related links at the Messenger and Advocate blog.

Science frequently causes old assumptions to be revised or even discarded. For example, it was long an assumption in Christian circles that the earth was created in six 24-hour days. Then the scientific evidence became nearly overwhelming for an old earth whose biosphere changed and developed over a course of many millions of years before man appeared. Many Christians then had to revisit their old assumption, noticing that the Hebrew word translated as "day" in Genesis 1 can also mean "epoch" or "time." (Latter-day Saints had a head-start in this area, as one version of the Creation story recorded in the Book of Abraham, translated by Joseph Smith, speaks of the creation events not in terms of days, but times.) Scientific evidence has led many Christians to drop an old but popular assumption to replace it with a more reasonable assumption, with no need to discard faith in God. (See, for example, the approach of Dr. Hugh Ross at Reasons.org, a scientist who accepts Genesis and the concept of an old earth. I, like most of the scientists I know who are also Christian, believe that God's creation proceeded under His direction in logical steps, roughly as described in Genesis, over a long period of time.)

DNA evidence of human origins, which entered public consciousness with the work of Cann et al. (1987) and the "African mitochondrial Eve," has been shaking up many old assumptions. The science around DNA and its role in tracing human origins is a complex topic with many helpful basic treatments available online, such as "American Indian mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Data: A Comprehensive Report of their Use in Migration and Other Anthropological Studies" by Peter N. Jones (2004), made available by the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management. We'll discuss the science in more detail below. For now, the main implication for the Book of Mormon is that a popular nineteenth-century assumption about the scope of the Book of Mormon made by many leaders and members of the Church is incorrect.

Many people, not knowing anything about the early settling of this continent outside of the migrations reported in the Book of Mormon, assumed that ALL Native Americans descended ONLY from the few small groups mentioned there. That assumption is wrong, to the best of our knowledge. The assumption that the Book of Mormon covered the entire hemisphere and explained all Native American origins is not supported by the text or by scientific evidence. It was not a matter of doctrine or anything affecting the core of our religion, but is an area of academic interest. Destroying that errant though understandable assumption with modern evidence does not destroy the Book of Mormon, but enhances our understanding of the details behind and helps clarify many issues in the text. The critics think they can destroy the LDS faith with DNA evidence, but all that is necessary is to revise and update an errant assumption--and keep learning!

DNA analysis of multiple Native American tribes generally points to Asian origins. Native American DNA does not appear to have distinctly "Jewish" traits. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed only along maternal lines, primarily falls into four groups--haplogroups--that are termed A, B, C, and D--and these same groups are typical of Asian DNA. Initial studies comparing the mtDNA of Native Americans and other peoples of the world pointed to a definite Asian origin. Latter-day Saints pointed out that Lehi's tiny group might have had negligible impact on the genes that would persist on the continent if the New World already had thousands or millions of people upon his arrival, as it almost certainly did. (See, for example, the discussion of Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1997) on the replacement of genes and languages of one group by those of another.) Still, some of us hoped that further genetic research would turn up something more interesting.

Then it was noticed that 3 or 4 percent of northern Native Americans had a fifth haplogroup called the X haplogroup, which was unknown in Asia but common in Europe and especially the Middle East. Some of us Latter-day Saints pointed to the non-Asian X haplogroup as evidence for possible transoceanic contact with Europe or the Middle East, though probably not as evidence for Lehi's migration since the estimated date of entry into the New World for haplogroup X was thousands of years before Lehi. But we would emphasize the complete absence of haplogroup X in Asia and its relative abundance in Europe and the Middle East, including Israel. But that would change in July, 2001, when a new report (Derenko, 2001) showed that haplogroup X had been discovered in Siberia after all. That report, as we shall see, raises more questions than it answers. While it is technically possible that nearly all Native Americans have a primarily Asian ancestry, a "Siberia only" origin does not square with all the evidence relating to New World origins.

In fact, as I discuss below, the recent work of Reidla et al. (2003) shows that the kind of haplotype X DNA in Siberia is not related to the haplotype X DNA found in the Americas. As I had previously speculated, Reidla et al. state that the small pocket of haplogroup X DNA in Siberia "are more likely explained by recent gene flow from Europe or from West Asia" rather than being remnants of a group that migrated to the Americas anciently.

For those seeking to understand the relationship between modern DNA studies and the Book of Mormon, there are several points to remember, each of which will be discussed in more depth below:

  1. The Book of Mormon does not claim to explain the primary genetic origins of all Native Americans.

  2. Since we do not know anything substantial about the DNA of Lehi or his wife in 600 B.C., what should the DNA of his descendants look like? (He was Hebraic, but not from the tribe of Judah, a presumably primary ancestral source for modern Jews).

  3. Since there were many other people in North and South America when Lehi landed, regardless of what has long been assumed, their net contribution to the gene pool of the continent could be minute. Must we expect that purely paternal or maternal lines going directly to Lehi or Sariah can be readily found today?

  4. The Book of Mormon uses the term "Lamanite" in several ways, including a genetic sense for those who are descended from Laman and Lemuel, but also in a cultural or sociopolitical sense to refer to those others who were not Nephites. Common LDS references to Native Americans as Lamanites is certainly logical under the broad definition. It is also possible that enough genetic diffusion has occurred for many Native Americans to have at least one genetic Lamanite in their ancestry, even though the impact on modern DNA would be hard to detect, even if we knew what to look for.

  5. Genetic evidence that would suggest relatively recent European ancestry for Native Americans (e.g., the kind of genes that might have been introduced by Lehi's group after 600 B.C. rather than before 30,000 B.C.) might be readily discarded by honest scholars because it could appear to be the result of recent mixing with Europeans or due to contamination with modern Caucasians. There is a real risk that genetic "smoking guns" relevant to the Book of Mormon might be completely missed due to standard scientific caution. Contamination of samples and European admixture in Native American subjects are real problems that researchers must struggle with--but these problems also greatly decrease the ability to detect "unexpected" recent Old World origins.

  6. The dating of the appearance of various human lines in the New World based on DNA analysis may be seriously incorrect. This is especially true of mtDNA analysis, where the directly observed mutation rate could be 20 times higher than previously assumed. The uncertainty in dating human lines directly affects at least some of the scientific criticisms of the Book of Mormon.

  7. In spite of DNA evidence pointing to one or more migrations from Siberia as the source of Native Americans, a wealth of other evidence exists pointing to additional ancient sources of Old World contact and even Old World genes. Though other migrations, including transoceanic journeys from various parts of the Old World, may not be supported using DNA evidence alone, the significance of these other sources of evidence must not be obscured by the limitations of DNA analysis of purely paternal or maternal lines. If other genetic, linguistic, and cultural evidence (e.g., Jett, 2002) provides a strong case for other non-Siberian migrations, as it does, then the silence of the DNA data to date should not take precedence.

  8. Given the depth of other evidences for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, the discomfiting need to abandon a popular but errant assumption poses no reason to abandon the truthfulness of the text. We have much to learn from DNA analysis, and nothing to fear, in spite of the new questions raised. More errant assumptions may be discarded along the way, but we have every reason to suppose that further discovery will only help us better understand the ancient inhabitants of this continent and the place occupied by Book of Mormon peoples.

  9. But having said that, the fact is that there may actually be significant evidences of Hebrew DNA in the Americas. The finding of haplogroup X in mtDNA studies and of haplogroup 1C, for example, in Y-chromosome analysis, could be due to an ancient migration of Hebrews or other Caucasians into the Americas. When critics charge that genetic data REFUTES the Book of Mormon, they are stretching things. The genetic data are not necessarily incompatible with the Book of Mormon text, and may even reflect evidence of Hebrew or Caucasian migrations consistent with Book of Mormon claims. It's more accurate to say that the genetic data probably does not rule out the Asia-only theory for Native American origins, but also does not rule out the possibility that Hebrew genetic matter is scattered across the Americas as well.

Further, we must recognize that DNA studies of Native Americans are still in their infancy. DNA tests have been conducted on a couple thousand Native Americans, representing only a tiny fraction of individuals. The tested individuals also represent only a fraction of the tribes and languages in the Americas. We must not assume that we understand the origins of all the present or ancient inhabitants of this continent on the basis of such limited testing. For example, Malhi et al. (2002) state:

The timing of initial entry into the Americas is uncertain. Through use of estimates of mtDNA diversity and rates of mtDNA evolution, a broad range of dates (11,000 - 43,000 years BP) have been estimated. Although researchers have recognized the need to incorporate population history in their estimates, the wide range of dates reported in the literature for the peopling of the Americas suggests that accurate models of Native American population history, accurate models of the evolution of mtDNA, and sufficient sampling of populations in the Americas have not yet emerged. For example, a large proportion of Native American linguistic diversity is found within California, yet only a few California Native American tribes and individuals have been typed for mtDNA markers.
We should also keep in mind the confounding effect of admixture of genes with modern settlers as well as the elimination of possibly 90% of the population of the continent due to disease brought by European explorers and settlers--raising the possibility of extensive loss of evidence pertaining to ancient origins.

What Does the Book of Mormon Claim? To the index at the top

The biggest problem with most anti-Mormon attacks involving DNA and the Book of Mormon is not so much the lack of scholarship about DNA as it is the lack of scholarship concerning the Book of Mormon. The critics are using tentative scientific findings to discredit common misconceptions about the Book of Mormon, not what the text actually teaches. Abandoning errant interpretations of the text is a healthy process, not one that requires changing denominations or becoming an atheist.

Sadly, purported scholars who attack the Book of Mormon have often failed to study the text seriously, and thus typically reach unjustified and even silly conclusions. For example, Thomas Murphy, in his much publicized article, "Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics" in American Apocrypha (ed. Dan Vogel and Brent L. Metcalfe, Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), argues that essentially all LDS scholars "reject a literal reading [of the Book of Mormon] and agree that Nephites and Lamanites never actually rode horses, traveled in chariots, used steel swords, raised cattle, or ate wheat and oats" (pp. 61-62). This statement shows remarkable ignorance of what serious LDS scholars have written and what the Book of Mormon says. Nowhere does the text say that Nephites rode horses (but it does say they had horses), nor does "oats" ever even appear in the text. And serious LDS scholars have explained that the elements Murphy finds to be silly are actually plausible, if we seek to understand what the translated words may actually mean: "chariot" need not refer to a wheeled vehicle; "steel" may refer to meteoric iron-nickel steel alloys ("steel" is the term metallurgists use to describe some of these meteoric materials) that were available for ancient use in Mesoamerica; there is evidence of pre-Columbian horses but the word "horse" could refer to other species; and "wheat" poses no particular problem (it may be a reasonable term for one or more Mesoamerican grains such as amaranth, huauzontle, or chia). See, for example, my LDSFAQ page on "Problematic Plants and Animals" in the Book of Mormon. The point is, if a purported scholar attacks the Book of Mormon for elements that are actually not even present in the text, one may freely question the scholarly merits of the attack in other areas that demand a serious knowledge of the text. And again, one will quickly see that what is being attacked is not the text itself, but someone's misunderstanding of it.

More egregious is the assumption of Murphy and others that the Book of Mormon teaches that the New World was settled only by Hebrews and their descendants--a claim that the Book of Mormon definitely does not make. That misconception has been rejected for decades by some LDS leaders and scholars, though it has still become part of popular LDS culture. It is this popular misunderstanding that Murphy mistakes for the teachings of the text itself--a sign of poor scholarship, as far as I am concerned. Murphy seems to think that evidence of dominant (but not necessarily exclusive) Asian origins for Native Americans rules out the Book of Mormon. This is a serious error on his part.

So what does the Book of Mormon teach that might be relevant to modern DNA studies?

The Book of Mormon speaks of three migrations to the New World. The first one is described in the Book of Ether. A group called the Jaredites were led by the Lord after the time of the tower of Babel. They founded a civilization, perhaps around 3000 B.C. or later, which collapsed in civil war around the time that Lehi and his family (Nephi, Laman, and others) arrived around 590 B.C. Lehi's group would split into the Nephites and Lamanites, both of whom would form societies that frequently would be at war with each other. A third migration involved a group of refugees from Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian conquest, including Mulek, said to be a son of King Zedekiah. At least some of the descendants of Mulek's group would later be assimilated by the Nephites.

Of all the people brought to the New World in these three migrations, we can only specify the ancestry of a small handful. Details compiled by Woody Brison are given on the page, "Why Should We Expect to Find Jewish DNA in Native Americans?." Lehi and his sons were of the Israelite tribe of Manasseh (part of the tribe of Joseph), being descended from Manasseh (Alma 10:3)--not necessarily along a purely paternal line. Knowing that Lehi was from Manasseh tells us nothing about his Y chromosome. A Hebrew tribal affiliation does not rule out the presence of non-Hebrew haplotypes in his DNA. We do know that the Jews were scattered to many parts of Europe and Asia. What about the lost tribe of Joseph? Did some of its members later settle in Asia, bringing their Y haplotype 1C and mtDNA haplotype X with them?

Mulek was almost certainly Jewish (of the tribe of Judah), but we know nothing about the genetics of others that came with him. The bottom line is that of the 32 individuals specifically named in the three migrations to the New World reported in the Book of Mormon, all we know for sure about their genetic origins is that one male was Jewish. Others may have been Jewish or at least largely Hebrew in their genetic constitutions, but we don't know for sure. It is simply sloppy thinking to reject the Book of Mormon based on the relative lack of "Jewish DNA" in the Americas, when the Book of Mormon itself doesn't even teach that the Nephites had DNA that we would recognize as Jewish. One Jewish male is identified, and there is no need to assume that his DNA survived among the later Nephites.

As for the mtDNA, we know nothing about the genetic make-up of Ishmael's wife, who would be the source of mtDNA for the children of Lehi (e.g., Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel). We know nothing about the DNA of Lehi's wife, Sariah, who would pass her mtDNA to Nephi's sisters. And we know nothing about the mtDNA of whatever locals Lehi's descendants encountered and married. If we could show that a portion of the women in ancient Jerusalem had mtDNA haplotypes A, B, C, or D, would our critics admit that the DNA evidence adds plausibility to the Book of Mormon? Not a chance. The uncertainty in the genetic composition of Lehi's group makes it impossible to use DNA data to evaluate the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, and makes the attacks of publicity-seeking Book of Mormon critics ring hollow.

Step back for a moment and recall what the Book of Mormon is. The Book of Mormon is primarily a record of the Nephite line (founded by males from the tribe of Manasseh, with uncertain genetic features, and then greatly augmented by the larger group we call the Mulekites, who very likely had mixed with local natives, resulting in a rapid loss of their Hebrew language). The book records their prophecies, their wars and struggles, and events of religious significance, particularly the ministry of Christ after His Resurrection. The focus is on the Nephites and their story. The record depicts the tragic collapse of the Nephites and their destruction as a people in war against the Lamanites 400 years after the ministry of Christ.

Based on analysis of the text and the geography of the Americas, the best candidate for the location of the peoples and civilizations described is Mesoamerica, including southern Mexico and Guatemala, as described by John L. Sorenson in An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Sorenson, 1985). The Book of Mormon provides a remarkably self-consistent description of the locations of the many places mentioned in the text, a description which can fit with great plausibility upon actual maps of Mesoamerica. And the plausibility is provided not just by the existence of hills, rivers, narrow necks of land, and so forth where they need to be, but there is also a cultural fit and specific candidates for cities that can be correlated with ancient sites in the Americas. Many questions remain, but some exciting insight into the reality and plausibility of the Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient record is provided by Sorenson's work.

According to the critics, the Book of Mormon claims that all Native Americans should be direct descendants from Lehi and thus show only Hebraic genes, which is not the case. Evidence of Siberian origins are said to refute Book of Mormon claims. But the critics misunderstand the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon text DOES NOT claim to explain the origins of all Native Americans. It is an incorrect and unfortunate assumption by early Mormons and many still living that the Americas were peopled by descendants of Lehi's group alone. No such claim is made in the text. And in spite of the modern foreword in the book, there is no claim that the Lamanites were somehow the "principal founders of the American Indians" (I have read that Bruce R. McConkie, who oversaw the editing of the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon, inserted that phrase in the foreword, apparently on his own and without consulting with others). In reality, there is no clear reason to exclude Siberian migration or other migrations to the New World. There is no reason to assume the Americas were unpopulated when Lehi arrived. In fact, based on information from the text itself, LDS scholars have long recognized that other groups must have been present. Population growth, the persistence of Jaredite names, competing social and religious systems, and other factors point to the existence of other groups, including remnants of the Jaredites (who may have been tied to the Olmec civilization).

An excellent source on this topic is Dr. John Sorenson's 1992 article, "When Lehi's Party Arrived in the Land, Did They Find Others There?" (J. Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1992), available online for subscribers to FARMS. Key points from his article include the following:

One interesting point that I wish to add concerns the term "Amalickiahites" in Alma 49:9. Amalickiah was a Nephite dissenter who used murder, deception, and great cleverness to become a Lamanite king and wage war against the Nephites. Verse 9 says "the Lamanites, or the Amalickiahites, were exceedingly astonished" at the Nephite defensive preparations. In this passage, the Amalickiahites are referred to as if they were a subset of the Lamanites. The term "Amalickiahites," describing the combination of Nephite dissenters and Lamanite warriors following king Amalickiah, clearly indicates a political, not genetic, relationship, and strengthens the concept that the term "Lamanite" also is not a purely genetic adjective.

In reviewing a work of John Sorenson (Nephite Culture and Society: Selected Papers, Salt Lake City: New Sage Books, 1997), Brant A. Gardner notes additional factors that point to the presence of others that Lehi and his group almost certainly encountered upon coming to the Americas (Gardner, 2001; see also Brant Gardner's online article, "A Social History of the Early Nephites"). For example, 2 Nephi 5:5,6 lists people in Lehi's group who went with Nephi as he split from Laman and Lemuel and their followers. Nephi lists his family, Sam and his family, Zoram and his family, Jacob and Joseph, his sisters, "and all those who would go with me." He then explains that "all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and revelations of God; wherefore, they did hearken unto my words" (2 Nephi 5:6). It appears that Laman, Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, who had been antagonistic to Nephi, are those left behind. The group of unnamed "others" seems by necessity to have included people other than those who came with Nephi from Jerusalem. If there were only one or two others, we would expect Nephi to list them. It's hard to say how many there might have been, but perhaps members of a local hamlet or group of hamlets may have allied with the technologically superior Old World group, helping the latter to learn how to survive in the New World while benefiting from their technology (particularly knowledge of metals).

Significant numbers of "others" is again implied when Nephi wrote that his people wanted him to be made their king (2 Nephi 5:18)--a silly gesture if there are only a couple dozen people, but logical if there is a sizable group. Further, Nephi wrote that Jacob and Joseph were made priests and teachers "over the land of my people" (2 Nephi 5:26), which would make no sense if there were only a couple of families besides Jacob's and Joseph's.

Gardner also points to economic indications that the Nephites quickly became part of an economy that involved multiple villages of "others." In addition to Sorenson's above-mentioned analysis of Jacob's encounter with Sherem, Jacob's writings also suggest that Nephites were part of an economic system in which abundant local gold and silver were being traded for precious items elsewhere. Jacob 2:12,13 refers to abundant local ores that are resulting in riches for some. For an early Nephite culture, what would an easily obtained local resource be worth? Gardner's analysis of this passage points to commerce with others to whom the metals were precious and could be used for trade. Similar implications are found in Jacob's condemnation of those who are acquiring "costly apparel." If the Nephites are a small isolated group, making their own clothing, Gardner asks where "costly apparel" would come from? Members of the group could simply copy the patterns of the best looking goods if everyone was making their own materials from the same basic raw materials. The presence of "costly apparel" again points to active commerce with others from other communities that comprise a large population base.

On the other hand, several verses in 2 Nephi 1 are often interpreted to support that idea that the Book of Mormon claimed the hemisphere was empty:

5 But, said he, notwithstanding our afflictions, we have obtained a land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands; a land which the Lord God hath covenanted with me should be a land for the inheritance of my seed. Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.

6 Wherefore, I, Lehi, prophesy according to the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord.

7 Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him whom he shall bring. And if it so be that they shall serve him according to the commandments which he hath given, it shall be a land of liberty unto them; wherefore, they shall never be brought down into captivity; if so, it shall be because of iniquity; for if iniquity shall abound cursed shall be the land for their sakes, but unto the righteous it shall be blessed forever.

8 And behold, it is wisdom that this land should be kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations; for behold, many nations would overrun the land, that there would be no place for an inheritance.

9 Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves. And if it so be that they shall keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of this land, and there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever. . . .

11 Yea, he will bring other nations unto them, and he will give unto them power, and he will take away from them the lands of their possessions, and he will cause them to be scattered and smitten.

Lehi speaks of a promised land for his posterity in 2 Nephi 1. Is "this land" just his local area in Mesoamerica or a much broader territory? In the context of related passages about the promised land, such as Ether 2, I think Lehi is probably talking about more than just the limited region where Book of Mormon events take place (a portion of Mesoamerica). But Lehi does not say that there was nobody else in the land (whether it be a limited region of Mesoamerica, a continent, or a hemisphere). In fact, he implies that "other nations" are available to threaten his descendants if they become wicked. Nephites became wicked within a couple hundred years of Nephi's arrival and had to flee north from their first inheritance, where they met the people of Zarahemla. Laman's group became wicked right away. And by 400 A.D., everyone was wicked. Must we assume that the only other nations that would come and affect life for Lehi's descendants would be the Gentiles who would not come until 1492 A.D.? Lehi's prophecy makes little sense unless there were other nations already on hand--as we surely know from archaeology and linguistic studies of the Americas.

Now it may be that there were other people upon the land, whose ancestors had been brought to the continent by the Lord (even across the Bering Strait, for all we know), but they were not powerful or organized enough--at least in Mesoamerica--to pose any sort of threat to Lehi's descendants. When verse 9 speaks of the land being kept from other nations, what is meant by "other nations"? Does this phrase mean that no one was on the continent, or that no other group had ever set foot on the continent? No. After all, the Jaredites had already been here and probably still had scattered remnants upon the land, and the Mulekites had probably just landed. And Lehi had already referred to this as a land of promise for other peoples who would come or had come (like the Jaredites) from "other countries" in verse 5. Verse 9 cannot exclude those whom the Lord had already brought to that sparsely populated continent, where there was plenty of space for an inheritance. I think it means being kept from common knowledge of other Old World nations who might invade and take over the place. Those who were already here had not given away the secret of the promised land to other nations. There may have been many on the continent who had been led from "other countries," yet the knowledge of the land had still been kept from "other nations"--such that the only ones here were those whom the Lord had originally led (not kings or military leaders), and such that there was adequate place and reasonable security for Lehi's descendants, if they would be righteous.

We should also realize that collections of small hamlets and villages--the type of population groups Lehi's family probably encountered upon coming to the New World--might not even be considered as "nations."

"Others in the Land": Not a New Position! To the index at the top

Bruce R. McConkie's Opinion in Mormon Doctrine: Native Americans Not Purely Hebraic

While Bruce R. McConkie apparently believed that Hebraic ancestry was highly significant among Native Americans, he also recognized that they shared non-Hebraic ancestry, according to his personal views offered in Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1973, p. 33):

"The American Indians . . . 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."

As shown above, the Book of Mormon recognizes that other peoples had come to the promised land and were present in the promised land. In fact, there may have been other significant groups also "led by the hand of the Lord." Thus, there is no reason to interpret Lehi's statements in a way that requires the entire hemisphere to be a vacuum. Given what we know from the Book of Mormon and from science, it can be reasonably understood to allow for many others in the hemisphere, which was still sparsely populated such that there was space and security for the righteous in their lands of possessions, if they would serve God.

Critics charge that the "others were here, too" view of the Book of Mormon and the limited geography view of most LDS scholars are desperate reversals of official LDS positions that have been made in an attempt to deal with recent scientific evidence about the Americas. This is far from true. While many LDS people have incorrectly assumed and taught that the Book of Mormon describes events across the entire hemisphere, there was never any official position on these issues, and plenty of room for other views, and for other migrations. John Sorenson, in his article on the presence of others when Lehi landed (Sorenson, 1992) was just one of many LDS voices who observed, before DNA evidence became a concern, that the Book of Mormon does not claim to explain the sole origins of all Native Americans, and that others could have been on the continent when Lehi or the Jaredites arrived. (Thomas Murphy has claimed that Ether 2:5 in the Book of Mormon says the Jaredites came to an unpopulated land, "where never man had been." But that description refers to their travels in the Old World, not the New--Murphy demonstrates a general lack of scholarship when it comes to the Book of Mormon.) And such views were being taught and understood by significant figures in the Church. For example, in 1929 Anthony W. Ivins of the First Presidency told Latter-day Saints:

We must be careful in the conclusions that we reach. The Book of Mormon teaches the history of three distinct peoples, or two peoples and three different colonies of people, who came from the old world to this continent. It does not tell us that there was no one here before them. It does not tell us that people did not come after. And so if discoveries are made which suggest differences in race origins, it can very easily be accounted for, and reasonably, for we do believe that other people came to this continent. (Ivins, 1929, p. 15)
Two years earlier, LDS scholar Janne Sjodahl wrote that "students should be cautioned against the error of supposing that all the American Indians are the descendants of Lehi, Mulek, and their companions" (Sjodahl, 1927, p. 435). He said it was "not improbable that America has received other immigrants from Asia and other parts of the globe" (ibid., p. 436). In 1938, William Berrett and Milton Hunter, with others, produced A Guide to the Study of the Book of Mormon as a study guide for the Church Department of Education. This book indicated that "the Book of Mormon deals only with the history and expansion of three small colonies which came to America and it does not deny or disprove the possibility of other immigrations, which probably would be unknown to its writers" (Berrett et al., 1938, p. 48).

Back in 1952, still long before the DNA controversy arose, Hugh Nibley wrote about Joseph Smith's apparent endorsement of migrations to the New World other than those of the Book of Mormon:

Long after the Book of Mormon appeared Joseph Smith quoted with approval from the pulpit reports of certain Toltec legends which would make it appear that those people had come originally from the Near East in the time of Moses [see Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 267]; whether such a migration ever took place or not, it is significant that the Prophet was not reluctant to recognize the possibility of other migrations than those mentioned in the Book of Mormon.

The argument of silence bears some weight in considering the possibility of "other sheep." When the Jaredites journey into a land "where there never had man been," [Ether 2:5, referring to a portion of their journey in the Old World] our history finds the fact worthy of note, even though the part was only passing through. Now there is a great deal said in the Book of Mormon about the past and future of the promised land, but never is it described as an empty land. The descendents of Lehi were never the only people on the continent, and the Jaredites never claimed to be."

(Hugh Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, originally published 1952, in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.5 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), p. 250.)

The above passage was also printed in an article by Hugh Nibley, "The World of the Jaredites," in the May 1952 issue of the official Church periodical, The Improvement Era. Nibley's work was more than just the random thoughts of an isolated scholar: his views were given extremely high visibility by the Church through publication in the official Church magazine. That does not mean that Nibley's views were endorsed by the First Presidency or given any kind of official status, but it devastates the absurd argument that the Church has always taught that all Native Americans are descended solely from Jews.

Further, in 1967, Nibley stated that "the Book of Mormon . . . presents no obstacles to the arrival of whatever other bands may have occupied the hemisphere without its knowledge" (Nibley, 1967, p. 249; pp. 218-219 in the 2nd edition).

In the Dec. 1975 Ensign publication of the Church, Lane Johnson, Assistant Editor, prepared a short article entitled "Who and Where Are the Lamanites?" (p. 15). In this article, he explains that the term "Lamanite" initially referred to the descendants of Laman, but shortly afterwards took on a broader term in which "the name Lamanite referred to a religious/political faction whose distinguishing feature was its opposition to the church. (See Jacob 1:13-14.)" He continues:

Lineage became an increasingly minor factor, and later there are many examples of Lamanites becoming Nephites and Nephites becoming Lamanites.

For nearly 200 years after the coming of Christ to the Americas, there were no Lamanites "nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God." (4 Ne. 1:17.) Soon, however, a part of the people fell away and took upon them the name of Lamanites; "therefore there began to be Lamanites again in the land." (4 Ne. 1:20.) Clearly, Lamanite in this case again refers to the state of righteousness of a political/religious group, presumably a composite of the descendants of many of the original colonists in the New World. The Lamanites of this definition survived beyond the close of the Book of Mormon record, and it is these people from whom the Lamanites of today descended. That is to say, they are the descendants of Lehi, Ishmael, and Zoram (see D&C 3:17-18); they are the descendants of Mulek and the others of his colony (see Hel. 6:10; Omni 1:14, 15); and they may also be descended from other groups of whom we have no record. Certainly they have mixed with many other lineages at the far reaches of their dispersal in the Americas and most of the islands of the Pacific since the time when Moroni bade them farewell in A.D. 421. (emphasis mine)

In 1960s, the First Presidency allowed the Church to publish a widely distributed pamphlet, "These Are The Mormons," by Richard L. Evans, reprinted from The Christian Herald (Nov. 1960), which made this statement about Book of Mormon peoples:
As the Bible is to ancient Israel, so the Book of Mormon is to ancient America. It is part of a sacred and secular record of prophets and people who were among the ancestors of the American "Indians," and covers principally the period from about 600 B.C. to 421 A.D. These peoples were of Asiatic origin, of the House of Israel, and brought with them certain Old Testament texts. [emphasis mine]
Book of Mormon peoples were not said to be the sole ancestors, but were among the ancestors of the American Indians, leaving open the possibility of other ancestors as well.

When John Sorenson of BYU published his paper in 1992 about others being on the continent, he argued convincingly that it is:

. . . inescapable that there were substantial populations in the "promised land" throughout the period of the Nephite record, and probably in the Jaredite era also. The status and origin of these peoples is never made clear because the writers never set out to do any such thing; they had other purposes. Yet we cannot understand the demographic or cultural history of Lehi's literal descendants without taking into account those other groups, too. (Sorenson, 1992)
Now, years later, some critics would have others believe that the Book of Mormon requires that all Indians descend solely from Jewish founders, and that this is the official teaching of the Church. It is a classic straw man argument.

For more information on the limited geography of the Book of Mormon being appreciated by LDS scholars and leaders decades ago, see the article "Unanswered Mormon Scholars" by Matthew Roper (1997, pp. 122-132). See also "The Historicity of the Book of Mormon" by Elder Dallin H. Oaks.

Past LDS teachings about "others in the land": Matthew Roper has published an excellent article, "Nephi's Neighbors: Book of Mormon Peoples and Pre-Columbian Populations," FARMS Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 91-128, which is available online for FARMS members. Here I quote a portion of his section entitled, "Latter-day Saint Views on Other Pre-Columbians":

Latter-day Saints have long been open to the idea that peoples not mentioned in the Book of Mormon may have migrated to the Americas either before, during, or after the events described in the Book of Mormon and that these various peoples intermingled with those of Israelite or Jaredite descent. The idea of other pre-Columbian migrations to the Americas has a long history and can be traced back to the earliest Latter-day Saints. . . . [Here is he discusses Joseph Smith's speculations on another possible Old World migration accounting for the origins of the Toltecs.]

Interest in the possibility of additional migrations to the Americas seems to have persisted among Latter-day Saints. In 1852, the Deseret News cited with interest an account of a purported Welsh migration to America "three hundred yeeres before Columbus." ["Discovery of America, above three hundred yeeres before Columbus, by Madoc ap Owen Gwyneth," Deseret News, 3 April 1852, p. 44.] Orson Pratt of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles interpreted the promises found in the book of Ether regarding other nations inheriting the land as referring to pre-Columbian migrants to the Americas after the Nephite destruction at Cumorah.

Now, these same decrees, which God made in relation to the former nations that inhabited this country, extend to us. "Whatever nation," the Lord said, "shall possess this land, from this time henceforth and forever, shall serve the only true and living God, or they shall be swept off when the fullness of his wrath shall come upon them." Since this ancient decree there are many nations who have come here. And lastly Europeans have come from what is termed the old world across the Atlantic.
[Orson Pratt, in Journal of Discourses, 12:343 (27 December 1868), emphasis added.]
It is significant that Pratt, one of the earliest converts to Mormonism, who did much to popularize the hemispheric model of Book of Mormon geography in the nineteenth century, apparently had no difficulty simultaneously asserting that many other nations came to the Americas in the interval between the Nephites' destruction and the European arrival.

Other Latter-day Saints of the time agreed with Elder Pratt. In an article published in 1875, George M. Ottinger, a faculty member at the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah), explored the idea advanced by some scholars of the day suggesting that the Phoenicians may have helped to colonize the Americas in pre-Columbian times. After surveying this literature, he concluded "that the Phoenicians at one time held intercourse with Jared's people." [George M. Ottinger, "Old America: The Phoenicians," Juvenile Instructor 10 (6 February 1875): 33.] Another Latter-day Saint author, in or about 1887, surmised that Lehi's people and the Jaredites "were contemporary co-workers in the work of civilizing the aborigines of the promise[d] land." ["Plain Facts for Students of the Book of Mormon, with a Map of the Promised Land" (n.p., [ca. 1887]), 3.] He viewed the account of Mosiah's union with the people of Zarahemla as evidence for the existence of indigenous peoples already in the land when they arrived. Mosiah "had to teach the Nephite language to the Zarahemlans, for though the parents of both people had come from Jerusalem at about the same time, and must have then the same verbiage, their off-spring took rather to their mothers, as it was but natural. Probably those Aborigines mothers were more numerous and influential, than their Hebrew husbands." Such intermarriages may not have been confined to the Mulekites. "Were most of those who helped Nephi to build that great temple Hebrews, and the many wives and concubines who caused the reprimand of Jacob from within the walls of the very same temple, aborigines?" [Ibid., 4n.] He argued the need for Latter-day Saints to preach the gospel among the Maya and other peoples of the region since, in his view, "most of the descendants of the genuine race of Lamanites, possibly live in Yucatan and Central America." [Ibid., 4.]

Thus, the sentiments of B. H. Roberts of the First Council of the Seventy, expressed in 1909, were not entirely unfamiliar to Latter-day Saints: "It cannot possibly be in conflict with the Book of Mormon to concede that the northeastern coast of America may have been visited by Norsemen in the tenth century; or that Celtic adventurers even at an earlier date, but subsequent to the close of the Nephite period, may have found their way to America. It might even be possible that migrations came by way of the Pacific Islands to the western shores of America." He also thought it "indisputable" that there have been at least some migrations from northeast Asia to North America over the Bering Strait. [B. H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1909), 2:356.] He continued, "It is possible that Phoenician vessels might have visited some parts of the extended coasts of the western world, and such events receive no mention in the Jaredite or Nephite records known to us." While the Book of Mormon text does not specifically mention such migrations, Roberts conceded that "the records now in hand, especially that of the Jaredites, are but very limited histories of these people." Transoceanic contacts may in fact have gone both ways: "It is not impossible that between the close of the Nephite period and the discovery of the western world by Columbus, American craft made their way to European shores." [Ibid., 2:357.] Thus, "even in Jaredite and Nephite times voyages could have been made from America to the shores of Europe, and yet no mention of it be made in Nephite and Jaredite records now known." [Ibid., 2:359.]

In 1902, Anthony W. Ivins, then president of the Juarez Stake in Mexico, suggested in an article published in the Improvement Era that Coriantumr may have taken wives and fathered children before his death among the Mulekites, a position with which Roberts was inclined to agree. [Anthony W. Ivins, "Are the Jaredites an Extinct People?" Improvement Era, November 1902, 44; Roberts, New Witnesses for God, 3:137-38 note k.] One of the most influential writers on the Book of Mormon in the early twentieth century, Janne M. Sjodahl, went even further; in 1927 he asked, "Have the Lamanites Jaredite blood in their veins?" and answered the question in the affirmative. [Janne M. Sjodahl, "Have the Lamanites Jaredite Blood in Their Veins?" Improvement Era, November 1927, 56-57.] Sjodahl interpreted the account in the book of Ether as "an epitome principally of the history of [the land of] Moron, where the Jaredites first established themselves." He postulated that, over time, "the Jaredites gradually settled in favorable localities all over the American continents, and that both Nephites and Lamanites came in contact with them, and that an amalgamation took place everywhere as in the case of the Nephites and Mulekites in Zarahemla." [Janne M. Sjodahl, "Suggested Key to Book of Mormon Geography," Improvement Era, September 1927, 986-87.] During their long history, descendants of the original Jaredite colony, according to Sjodahl, could have become widely dispersed throughout the Americas at various times and would not have been directly involved in events associated with Coriantumr, Shiz, and their people. Under this interpretation, Ether's prophecy of Jaredite destruction (Ether 13:20-21) concerned only those associated with Coriantumr's kingdom near the narrow neck of land and not the entire northern hemisphere. [Janne M. Sjodahl, "The Jaredite Lands," Improvement Era, June 1939, 371; Sjodahl, "Have the Lamanites Jaredite Blood in Their Veins?" 57. Roper provides additional examples from other writers in footnote 27 of his article.]

What is a Lamanite? To the index at the top

Critics often refer to the mention of "Lamanites" in the Doctrine and Covenants, a term used to refer to the American Indians to whom the Gospel was to be preached. Is it a fatal error to use this term if some or most American Indians are not direct descendants of Laman? It's important to note that the Book of Mormon uses the term "Lamanite" in more than one sense, as I already noted above in summarizing the work of Sorenson (1992). It can have a genetic meaning, referring to a descendant of Laman, but it can also have a sociopolitical meaning, referring to non-Nephites or former enemies of the Nephites in general, without specific genetic requirements. Thus, Nephites who dissent and team up with Lamanite forces are said to be Lamanites. In the book of Fourth Nephi, after the golden era of Nephite history following the ministry of the Lord, when Nephites and Lamanites lived in harmony (and presumably intermarried) without being called "ites" of any kind, an era began in which there was rebellion against the Church and apparently the government of the people. Those who rejected the Gospel "were called Lamanites, and Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites," while the believers were called Nephites (4 Nephi 1:37,38). These labels seem to be religious and sociopolitical labels more than genealogical markers, consistent with Jacob's use in Jacob 1:11. This is also consistent with the Lord's use of the term Lamanite in Doctrine and Covenants 10:48, referring to the preaching of the Gospel to "the Lamanites, and also all that had become Lamanites because of their dissensions."

A hint about the non-genetic distinction between Lamanites and Nephites in at least some is found in 3 Nephi 6:3, where former robbers who "who were desirous to remain Lamanites" were granted separate lands for their use, rather than being forced to live under Nephite rule. Here it appears that being a Lamanite was a choice.

A related thought is found in Alma 45:13,14, where Alma prophesies that after the Nephites become wicked and are destroyed as a people, then the descendants of the Nephites will be "numbered among the Lamanites." It's not that there are no more Nephites left, but, as I see it, their government, religion, and way of life will have perished, and those who are left "shall become like" the Lamanites (v. 14), and thus no longer carry the Nephite label.

Political or religious dissent made one a Lamanite, as well as descent from Laman (or the other rebels in Lehi's group). In its cultural, religious, or political sense, all Native Americans may be termed Lamanites. Nevertheless, given the wide intermixing that appears to have occurred in North America, I would not be surprised if there is not at least one "genetic Lamanite" ancestor in the heritage of most Native Americans. One does not have to be primarily descended from Lehi's group to be a Lamanite by blood as well as by culture. I am clearly Caucasian, yet am proud to have Native American blood. How much? One part in 512 is Mohawk. Not enough to qualify as an official tribal member, but a portion of my genes are still Native American. Unfortunately, those genes won't show up in mtDNA or Y-chromosome work. My descent from a Mohawk woman was not along purely maternal lines.

Asiatic Origins Taught by the Book of Mormon? To the index at the top

Critics of the Book of Mormon want the world to think that it requires nothing but Jewish ancestry for all Native Americas. This is an absurd simplification. In fact, the account of the Jaredites in the Book of Ether points to Asiatic origins for a very ancient migration. And though Ether saw a great battle with few survivors as the Jaredite civilization collapsed, the Book of Mormon provides subtle hints (discussed above) that Jaredite influence remained in population groups that mixed with the Nephites and Lamanites.

As Hugh Nibley explained in 1952, in an article printed in the official publication of the Church at the time, the Book of Mormon identified Asia as a source for ancient Native Americans long before anthropologists did. The essay was "The World of the Jaredites," Improvement Era, Vol. 55, June 1952, from which I quote:

That account [the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon] tells us that at the very dawn of history, many thousands of years ago, a party of nomad hunters and stock raisers from west central Asia crossed the water--very probably the North Pacific--to the New World, where they preserved the ways of their ancestors, including certain savage and degenerate practices, and carried on a free and open type of steppe warfare with true Asiatic cruelty and ferocity; it tells us that these people moved about much in the wilderness, for all they built imposing cities, and that they produced a steady trickle of "outcasts" through the centuries. A careful study of the motions of the Jaredites, Mulekites, Nephites, and Lamanites should correct the absurd oversimplification by which the Book of Mormon as a history is always judged. It will show as plain as day that the Book of Mormon itself first suggests the Asiatic origin of some elements at least of the Indian race and culture long before the anthropologists got around to it. The scientists no longer hold that one migration and one route can explain everything about the Indians. The Book of Mormon never did propound a doctrine so naive. [emphasis mine]
Thus, given that the apparently Asiatic Jaredites were on the continent long before the Nephites, and given that other migrations from Asia are permitted by the Book of Mormon, finding evidence of mostly Asiatic genes in the Americas does not necessarily pose a problem for the Book of Mormon. This understanding of the Book of Mormon (the Jaredites as an Asiatic migration, and the possibility of other migrations from Asia being allowed by the Book of Mormon) is not one just recently concocted to deal with recent DNA evidence--it was printed in the official Church periodical decades before critics used DNA evidence to attack a common misreading of the Book of Mormon. In fact, even if we were to erroneously conclude that the ONLY ancient migrations to the New World are those described in the Book of Mormon, the heavy presence of Asian genes in Native Americans could still be compatible with the apparently Asian origins of the ancient Jaredites, whose descendants may have spread across the continent and obviously were present in Book of Mormon lands in Mesoamerica even after Ether saw their central groups wiped out in a bloody civil war.

What Does DNA Evidence Show? To the index at the top

Background:

The recent ability of scientists to determine the structure of human DNA has created an explosion of research involving genetics, disease, evolution, and the origins of human population groups. The study of human origins is facilitated by analysis of DNA that is spared the complexity of the recombination. While most genes can come from either parent, such that the DNA from the parents is recombined in the child, some parts of human DNA are free from recombination. The mitochondria, small energy-producing structures in our cells, contain special DNA that is inherited only from the mother, without recombination with the DNA of the father. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) shows DNA structures that have been passed along purely maternal lines, from mother to daughter over the generations. Such analysis has proven to be a useful tool for many purposes (Richards and Macaulay, 2001). Likewise, the Y chromosome in men is passed along paternal lines only. Analysis of Y chromosomes can be used to link modern humans to male ancestors. Both mtDNA and Y chromosomes are subject to mutations that occur rarely but with presumably constant rates (the rates depend on what portion of the DNA is being examined--some portions mutate frequently, others remain very steady over time). Groups that share many common mutations can be presumed to be closely related. Groups that have very few common mutations may be presumed to come from family lines that diverged long ago.

The typical human mtDNA molecule is a circular molecule comprising 16569 nucleotides in a specific order. These nucleotides, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine are labeled A, G, C, and T, respectively. An arbitrary position has been defined as nucleotide 1. A standard mtDNA sequence, known as the Cambridge Reference, was the first published human mtDNA sequence (S. Anderson et al., 1981). Mutations can result in a variety of changes, such as a substitution of one nucleotide for another, a deletion of a part of the sequence, or the addition of one or more nucleotides.

Several tools are used in DNA studies. Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) classified DNA by analysis of patterns in DNA that has been cleaved into chunks by enzymes (restriction endonuclease). If two organisms differ in the distance between sites of cleavage achieved with a particular enzyme, the length of the fragments produced by enzymatic attack will differ. The similarity of the patterns generated can be used to distinguish species. Recent studies employ up to 14 different enzymes that can provide high resolution of differences in portions of human DNA. RFLP is often applied to a highly variable portion of non-coding DNA in the mitochondria called either the control region (CR) or the D-loop.

Direct sequencing of portions of human DNA yields series of nucleotides that allow direct comparison of various genes with those of different individuals. The extensive sequence information can be used to map groups of related individuals into clusters or clades.

Genetic analysis can also be done looking at proteins in the blood, the presence of certain genetic diseases or other genetic traits, and so forth.

Evidence for Asian Origins and Arguments against the Book of Mormon

Studies in the 1980s based on analysis of linguistic, dental, and genetic evidence resulted in the hypothesis that there were three genetic groups in the Americas, the Amerinds, the Na-Denes, and the Aleut-Eskimos, apparently due to three separate migrations of ancestral Asian populations across the Bering Strait. Greenberg et al. (1986) suggested that the first migration (beginning 12,000 years ago) eventually resulted in the spread of Amerind-speakers throughout North, Central, and South America, followed by additional migrations that brought the ancestors of the NaDene-speakers and Aleut-Eskimo speakers into the northern part of the continent. Other early genetic studies supported the three-wave model, while mtDNA studies have pointed to as many as four major waves of migration. But in 1995, a commonly-cited study by Merriwether et al. (1995) argued for a single migration from Mongolia or northern China, based on their review of mtDNA evidence. (See also Kolman et al., 1996.)

A critical fact is that the dominant mtDNA haplogroups in the New World, called haplogroups A, B, C, and D, could all be found in Asia and could very well have originated there. Some have argued that only one migration of a founder population could give rise to all four haplogroups in the New World.

The single-migration view is being eroded in the wake of additional recent studies pointing to multiple migrations. An excellent but very brief summary of recent developments in this area is given by Dillehay (2003 - available online), who notes the growing evidence for multiple migrations (from various Asia and the Pacific rim) and concludes by saying, "Slowly, we are realizing that the ancestry of the Americas is as complex and as difficult to trace as that of other human lineages around the world."

Among genetic studies that challenge single-migration views, Karafet et al. (1999) studied Y-chromosome markers from over 2000 DNA samples from around the world, including 62 Inuit Eskimos, 12 Mixe, 29 Mixtecs, 22 Kazakhs, 30 Evenks, 18 Melanesians, and 54 samples from several tribes in Panama. Fifteen indigenous North Asian groups were also included. Based on analysis of the 95 haplotypes they identified, the authors concluded that there were multiple founder haplotypes that entered the Americas, including the possibility of multiple migrations from a region in Siberia.

In addition to citing Merriwether et al. (1995) to support a single Asiatic migration, Book of Mormon critics are regularly citing a recent article by F.R. Santos et al., "The Central Siberian Origin for Native American Y Chromosomes," American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 64, 1999, pp. 619-628, as evidence that the Book of Mormon is wrong. Some of them like this study so much that they have plagiarized the entire article on their Web pages. No need to use a plagiarized copy; use the legal electronic full-text version of Santos et al. (1999) at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJHG980542. (The PDF file is at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?AJHG980542PDF.)

The study of Santos et al. (1999) was conducted with a worldwide sample of 306 men. The major Y haplogroup present in most (not all) Native Americans suggested common ancestry with some Siberians, especially the Kets and Altaians from the Yanissey River Basin and the Altai Mountains, respectively. As we will see, this region appears to be one of the best candidates for a major source of New World genes, though other studies point to other parts of Asia.

As always, though, the scope of the study included only a small number of individuals. The 306 men included only a minute sampling of New World genes:

Ten samples, from south and central Amerindians and a Nadene, were purchased from the National Institute of General Medical Science, and an additional 10 Native American samples (not Aleut-Eskimo) came from paternity tests in North America. (p. 620)
Rare haplotypes are not likely to be found with such small sample sizes. The study does not and cannot purport to explain the origins of ALL Native Americans or to rule out limited infusion from the Middle East long after 10,000 B.C. But it does provide a plausible case that most Native Americans share common ancestry with some Siberians. The DNA evidence alone, however, does not explain which group migrated where, when, or how--but based on geologic and other evidence, it is reasonable to assume a Bering Strait migration from Asia occurred.

However, the text of Santos et al. (1999) is not nearly so harmful to the Book of Mormon as critics would have us believe. In fact, Santos et al. (1999) provides evidence that the principal ancestors of Native Americans may have Caucasian ties, though much more ancient than would fit the Book of Mormon text, if we accept the accuracy of the evolutionary dating methods used. Let's consider several excerpts from this study:

In all the trees, the Native American Y chromosomes clustered with Kets, Altaians, and Caucasoids (Europeans and Indians). European admixture cannot explain this cluster, because if we exclude in the analysis all haplotypes present in Siberians and Amerindians that are also found in Europe (such as haplotype 1, which appears in four Native Americans), the tree remains very similar. . . . (p. 624)

Although some Siberian and Native American Y chromosomes show remarkably close association with Caucasoid Y chromosomes, other Siberian populations are very distinct, clustering with other Asians. . . . (p. 624)

In addition, these data identify the group of Ket and Altaian Y chromosomes that are related to those among Native Americans and Caucasoids, whereas the Evenki Y chromosomes are related to those of Mongolians. . . . (p. 625)

The major Native American haplotype 31 is present on both sides of Beringia, most likely because of an American or Beringian origin of the mutation in the DYS199 locus (Karafet et al. 1997; Lell et al. 1997). Its immediate ancestor, haplotype 10, is a rare haplotype (11 of 306 individuals) seen only in North America (n = 6), India (n = 4), and Mongolia (n = 1). An old population bearing haplotype 10, a Native American/Siberian/Caucasoid common ancestor, has been placed somewhere in central Eurasia . Haplotypes 1 (Caucasoid), 20 (Siberian and Native American), and 31 (Native American) are derived from this ancestor. The most common European chromosome, haplotype 1, appeared in four Native American samples from paternity tests in North America; thus, they very likely could be due to recent admixture. Haplotype 20, another descendant of haplotype 10 by a simple alphoid locus deletion step, is very frequent in Kets and was found in some Altaians, all of whom were shown to also have the DYS19 A allele (data not shown), which is also present in most individuals with haplotype 31 (Pena et al. 1995; Santos et al. 1995a; Underhill et al. 1996). Recently, the Ket language was suggested to be closely related to the Na-Dene language (Greenberg 1996), and the resemblance of Kets to Native Americans and Caucasoids, with regard to physical appearance (Forsyth 1996) and Y chromosomes (this study), makes them the most likely central Siberian population to share the same recent ancestors. The Altaians, a common denomination for seven formerly distinct Turkic populations, exhibit very diverse Y haplotypes and could have acquired their Y chromosomes from many neighboring tribes, including the Kets (Forsyth 1996). . . . (p. 626, emphasis mine, references to a table and a figure deleted)

The very recent find of the 9,400-year-old skeleton of the Kennewick man, which displays some Caucasoid characteristics, and his contemporary, the Spirit Cave mummy, suggests that the earliest migrants could be distinct from present-day populations (Morell 1998b). Possible genetic relationships between Eurasians and Native Americans are suggested by the presence of the rare mtDNA haplogroup X in both population groups, which apparently is absent in Siberia (Morell 1998a). Alternatively, in our study, the Y chromosome data reveal a common ancestor (haplotype 10) between Native Americans and Europeans, who left some rare descendants in Siberia, among the Kets and Altaians. However, the presence of the most common European haplotype 1 in the Americas can be explained as a recent European admixture more likely than as a remnant of a pre-Columbian migrant. Our Y chromosome data, when compared with morphological and mtDNA data, could imply another migration of typically Mongoloid people, who would have left phenotypic traces in their Native American descendants without contributing many of their Y chromosomes. This pattern of unequal paternal and maternal contributions in the gene pools of several populations has been characterized and discussed in detail by Poloni et al. [E.S. Poloni, Amer. J. Human Genetics, 61: 1015-1035 (1997)]. (p. 626, references to a table deleted)

This study traces the major Native American Y chromosome haplotype to the immediate ancestor shared with present-day Siberians and to an older common ancestor shared with Caucasoids (Europeans and Indians). This common ancestry of Native Americans and Caucasoids could explain the existence of non-Mongoloid skeletons, such as the Kennewick man. (p. 627, emphasis mine)

The authors estimate that first migrants with a proto-Caucasoid Y chromosome entered the New World 30,000 years ago. Of course, the date of entry of these European-related genes is long before Book of Mormon times, if the assumptions behind the dating are correct. Interestingly, the scenario painted here is not one of typical Asians migrating across the Bering Strait, but of a clan with roots in Central Asia who migrated across Asia, leaving little trace except for a few descendants among the Kets and Altaians. And given the diversity of Y chromosomes among the Altaians, the authors speculate that they may have obtained their Y chromosomes from other groups, such as the Kets.

The authors argue against a single migration (p. 627), and speak of multiple minor migrations that would have brought the more recent Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut groups (p. 626).

Thus, one of the major studies used to supposedly shut the coffin on the Book of Mormon points to ancient genetic ties to Europe and Central Asia, and supports the possibility of multiple migrations to the New World. The dating of the first major migration, though, does not relate to Book of Mormon peoples.

Many other studies yield similar conclusions, including those showing that most Native Americans fall within one of four major haplogroups, A, B, C, or D, groups which are also typical of Asia. For several years, the mtDNA results appeared to raise insurmountable barriers for some people's understanding of the Book of Mormon. Four major haplogroups dominated the New World, and they all appeared to come from Asia, not the Middle East. It even appears that a few people left the Church because their testimonies were so shaken. Why were there no genetic markers linking modern "Lamanites" with the ancient Middle East? Was the whole Book of Mormon one huge fraud?

Enter Haplogroup X To the index at the top

Then followed an important new development in the mtDNA analysis. Early conclusions had to be revisited in light of new evidence, for there was actually a fifth haplogroup that had been found in several Native American populations, a haplogroup that was not known to exist in Asia but which WAS found throughout Europe and the Middle East, including Israel. This fifth haplogroup was termed the "X haplogroup" (though Parr et al., 1996, speak of a "haplotype N" found in ancient DNA in Fremont Amerindians, which I believe was actually haplotype X). Key studies exploring its implications for New World origins include those of Brown et al. (1998) and Forster et al. (1996).

Virginia Morell (1998) provided some of the early publicity on haplogroup X in an article in the widely read journal Science. Here are a few excerpts:

Anthropologists have long assumed that the first Americans, who crossed into North America by way of the Bering Strait, were originally of Asian stock. But recently they have been puzzled by surprising features on a handful of ancient American skeletons, including the controversial one known as Kennewick Man--features that resemble those of Europeans rather than Asians (Science, 10 April 1998, p. 190). Now a new genetic study may link Native Americans and people of Europe and the Middle East, offering tantalizing support to a controversial theory that a band of people who originally lived in Europe or Asia Minor were among the continent's first settlers.

The new data, from a genetic marker appropriately called Lineage X, suggest a "definite--if ancient--link between Eurasians and Native Americans," says Theodore Schurr, a molecular anthropologist from Emory University in Atlanta, who presented the findings earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Salt Lake City....

The team, led by Emory researchers Michael Brown and Douglas Wallace, and including Antonio Torroni from the University of Rome and Hans-Jurgen Bandelt from the University of Hamburg in Germany, was searching for the source population of a puzzling marker known as X. This marker is found at low frequencies throughout modern Native Americans and has also turned up in the remains of ancient Americans. Identified as a unique suite of genetic variations, X is found on the DNA in the cellular organelle called the mitochondrion, which is inherited only from the mother.

Researchers had already identified four common genetic variants, called haplogroups A, B, C, and D, in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of living Native Americans (Science, 4 October 1996, p. 31). These haplogroups turned up in various Asian populations, lending genetic support for the leading theory that Native Americans descended primarily from these peoples. But researchers also found a handful of other less common variants, one of which was later identified as X.

Haplogroup X was different. It was spotted by Torroni in a small number of European populations. So the Emory group set out to explore the marker's source. They analyzed blood samples from Native American, European, and Asian populations and reviewed published studies. "We fully expected to find it in Asia," like the other four Native American markers, says Brown.

To their surprise, however, haplogroup X was only confirmed in the genes of a smattering of living people in Europe and Asia Minor, including Italians, Finns, and certain Israelis. The team's review of published mtDNA sequences suggests that it may also be in Turks, Bulgarians, and Spaniards. But Brown's search has yet to find haplogroup X in any Asian population. "It's not in Tibet, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, or Northeast Asia," Schurr told the meeting. "The only time you pick it up is when you move west into Eurasia." (emphasis mine)

Haplogroup X is found in several places outside of Asia, including among the Finns, for example (Finnila et al., 2001), who are often thought to be an outlier group in Europe in light of Y chromosome studies, but nevertheless appear to share many mtDNA lineages with other Europeans. Detailed information about the mutations separating the X haplogroup from the Cambridge Reference and other European haplogroups are provided by Finnila et al. (2001)--especially see their Figure 2.

A related article is on the Web: "Europeans Colonised America in 28,000 BC" by Roger Highfield (2000), Science Editor for Britain's Electronic Telegraph news service. Here's an excerpt:

The find has led to some speculation that ancient people crossed the Atlantic from the Old World, because evidence of the group has not so far been found in Asia, though [Schurr] stressed that not all central Asian groups had been analysed. Dr Schurr said: "Haplogroup X was brought to the New World by an ancient Eurasian population in a migratory event distinct from those bringing the other four lineages to the Americas."

The haplogroup X occurs most among Algonkian-speaking groups such as the Ojibwa [sometimes spelled Ojibwe], and has been detected in two pre-Colombian north American populations. Today, haplogroup X is found in between two and four per cent of European populations, and in the Middle East, he said, particularly in Israel. (emphasis mine)

Though found mostly in the northern parts of the Americas, there is tentative evidence of haplogroup X being found in ancient remains in Guatemala, among the Iximché tribe. David M. Reed at the University of Michigan mentions this tentative finding on his Web page at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dmreed/Activities.html:
I am studying anthropological genetics and biostatistics while performing new research into the population history of the Americas. For the most recent national anthropology meetings I presented preliminary results from mtDNA analysis of the Iximché skeletons. The most tantalizing feature was the possible X-lineage individual. If this result holds it will represent one of the only times that haplotype X has been found.
Further, Schurr (2000) points to other evidence of haplotype X in "two Pre-Columbian North American populations" and possibly "a few ancient Brazilian samples." He may be referring to the work of Ribero-dos-Santos et al. (1996), as later clarified (Ribero-dos-Santos et al., 1997).

Now even if haplogroup X could be shown to come from Israel, that would not prove the Book of Mormon to be true. The haplogroup X which links "certain Israelis" and Europeans with Native Americans may have no relation to the Nephites, the Jaredites, or the Mulekites. Indeed, their estimated arrival date is about 10,000 B.C. or earlier, too early to be related directly to Book of Mormon history, if the assumptions behind the dating are correct (and as shown elsewhere on this page, there is good reason to reject those assumptions). But this new study strengthens the possibility of ancient migrations from the Middle East to the Americas, a possibility that has long been denied by Book of Mormon critics and others.

In discussing haplogroup X and Native American origins, Dr. Theodore G. Schurr (2000) reviews the wide diversity of Native American genotypes and provides many intriguing photographs showing great diversity. He demonstrates that the distribution of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) groups in the New World is much more complicated than previously thought, and cannot be explained solely by Siberian genes arriving via the Bering Strait. Schurr estimates haplogroup X has been on this continent for 13,000 to 35,000 years (though I would suggest that a recent migrant group already having a diversity of haplogroup mutations could bring new DNA that appears old). He also discusses other haplogroups, such as H, T, J, and L. Not enough work has been done yet to clearly determine whether these are all due to mixing with Old World peoples since the time of Columbus, or whether these haplogroups were present more anciently.

In spite of the problem with the dating of haplogroup X, several Latter-day Saints, including myself, were excited by the fact that it was found in Israelis but NOT anywhere in Asia, suggesting that Siberia-only theories of Native American origins were simply wrong. This changed in 2001.

Discovery of Haplogroup X in Siberia To the index at the top

The lack of the haplogroup X in Siberia posed a problem for "Siberia only" theories of Native American origins--until it was discovered among the Altai people, a miniscule group in south western Siberia. Derenko (2001) reports the discovery and the implications for New World settling. The Altaians, the only group in Asia of many studied now known to have haplogroup X, live in Southern Siberia and comprise 60,000 people divided between seven formerly distinct Turkic-speaking groups: the Altai-Kizhi, Teleuts, and Telenghits (these three are southern Altaians), and the Chelkans, Kumandins, Tubalars, and Maimalars (these four are the northern Altaians). Southern Altaians are said to be typical central Asian Mongoloids, from the viewpoint of anthropology, while "the northern Altaians exhibit some Caucasoid anthropological features" (Derenko, p. 240). According to Derenko et al., over 3% of Altaians have haplogroup X. Its presence cannot be explained by recent admixture with Russians, among whom haplogroup X occurs at very low levels (3 out of 336 subjects tested). (Though unlikely, one could imagine that admixture could have occurred with a group of Russians rich in haplogroup X.) The Altaians not only have haplogroup X, but like many other Asian populations, have the other 4 mtDNA haplogroups that dominate indigenous New World peoples: A, B, C, and D. Thus, one can consider the ancestors of the Altaians as a candidate that could account for New World haplogroups, especially for haplogroup X.

Derenko et al. (2001) imply that the discovery of haplogroup X resolves many questions about Native American origins, stating that, "It is obvious that we have now the genetic evidence that will allow closer determination of which Siberian population was the source of the population expansion leading to modern American Indians. . . ." (p. 240)

But are the Altaians directly tied to Native Americans? The species of haplogroup X found among the Altaians is different than that found in the New World. Derenko's mapping of the relationships based on mutations between various European, New World, and Altaians X haplotypes shows distinct differences. None of the Altaian X mtDNAs had a mutation called the 225A variant, whereas Brown et al. (1998) identify the 225A variant as a major marker for the X haplogroup. In Brown's study, 11 of 22 Native Americans with X mtDNA had the 225A variant, which is also commonly associated with European X mtDNA. Brown et al. (1998) report that the nucleotide at position 225 "appears to be stable, since this variant [225A] has never been seen in populations from Asia, Central and South America, or Africa" (p. 1855, citations deleted). And it has still not been seen among the Altaians. It is true that Native American X mtDNA differs with respect to typical European X mtDNA in some ways, but without the 225A variant among the Altaians, we need not accept the Altaians as the sole source of X mtDNA in the New World.

As discussed above, discovery of haplogroup X in an isolated, tiny group in Asia does not answer many questions. Does the presence of haplogroup X in Siberia really mean that the Altaians crossed the Bering Strait--leaving no trace along their Asian route? Out of all the peoples that could have crossed the Bering Strait, many of whom were closer than the Altaians, why did just this one small group become the alleged primary founders of New World? Isn't it just as likely that a group of Native Americans, X haplotypes and all, migrated into the Old World to join the ancestors of the Altaians? Or couldn't the Altaians, with their ties to Turkic languages, have ancestors that came from the Middle East, bringing their X haplotypes with them?

The discovery of X mtDNA among the Altaians is tantalizing evidence of--well, something. It does not answer many questions or explain the source of the 225A variant in the New World. But there could be a connection that merits further attention.

Brown's work (1998) also suggested that Native American haplotype X mtDNA differed from Old World haplotype X DNA with respect to nucleotide position 16213, but new information on this issue comes from Malhi et al. (2002):

Brown et al. (1998) demonstrated that Europeans assigned to haplogroup X lack a mutation at np 16213 in the HVSI [hypervariable segment I] that all Native Americans exhibit. However, the larger sample size of individuals assigned to haplogroup X in the present study reveals that a substantial number of Native Americans in multiple geographic regions also lack the np 16213G mutation and therefore have haplotypes identical to those of European (Brown et al. 1998) and Asian (Derenko et al. 2001) members of haplogroup X.
Thus, at least with regard to the mutation at np 16213, it is possible that Native American haplotype X mtDNA could have Asian or European origins (which need not rule out entry by Jewish ancestors).

Nov. 2003 Update: The recent work of Reidla et al. (2003) confirms the statements above indicating that the haplogroup X DNA in the Americas is not directly related to the unusual little pocket haplogroup X DNA in Siberia (the Altai region). In fact, their study of X DNA is consistent with the idea that the general region of the Middle East (West Eurasia) ultimately could have been the source of the haplogroup X DNA found in the Americas, though they give dates (based on standard dating assumptions) that are many thousands of years too early to explain haplogroup X in the Americas by an appeal to the Book of Mormon. According to Reidla et al.:

The results of this study point to the following conclusions. First, haplogroup X variation is completely captured by two ancient clades that display distinctive phylogeographic patterns--X1 is largely restricted to North and East Africa, whereas X2 is spread widely throughout West Eurasia. Second, it is apparent that the Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs derive from X2 by a unique combination of five mutations. Third, the few Altaian (Derenko et al. 2001) and Siberian haplogroup X lineages are not related to the Native American cluster, and they are more likely explained by recent gene flow from Europe or from West Asia. [emphasis mine]
Here is the abstract for Reidla et al. (2003):
A maximum parsimony tree of 21 complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences belonging to haplogroup X and the survey of the haplogroup-associated polymorphisms in 13,589 mtDNAs from Eurasia and Africa revealed that haplogroup X is subdivided into two major branches, here defined as "X1" and "X2." The first is restricted to the populations of North and East Africa and the Near East, whereas X2 encompasses all X mtDNAs from Europe, western and Central Asia, Siberia, and the great majority of the Near East, as well as some North African samples. Subhaplogroup X1 diversity indicates an early coalescence time, whereas X2 has apparently undergone a more recent population expansion in Eurasia, most likely around or after the last glacial maximum. It is notable that X2 includes the two complete Native American X sequences that constitute the distinctive X2a clade, a clade that lacks close relatives in the entire Old World, including Siberia. The position of X2a in the phylogenetic tree suggests an early split from the other X2 clades, likely at the very beginning of their expansion and spread from the Near East.
Interestingly, a search of Reidla et al.'s dataset for Old World matches for some of the five unique mutations defining the North American haplotype X clade X2a found a match for only one of the mutations and that came from Iran. This may point to the Near East as the source for a common ancestor for Native American haplotype X mtDNA, but the authors suggest that the match is more likely due to recurrence of mutations rather than common origins:
The Native American-specific clade X2a appears to be defined by five mutations, three in the coding region (8913, 12397, and 14502) and two in the control region (200 and 16213) (fig. 1). The transition at np 200 was seen in virtually all previously analyzed Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs, whereas the transition at np 16213 was absent in some of the Ojibwa described by Brown et al. (1998). We surveyed our Old World haplogroup X mtDNAs for the five diagnostic X2a mutations (table 2) and found a match only for the transition at np 12397 in a single X2* sequence from Iran. In a parsimony tree, this Iranian mtDNA would share a common ancestor with the Native American clade (fig. 2). Yet, the nonsynonymous substitution at np 12397 converting threonine to alanine cannot be regarded a conservative marker, as it has also been observed in two different phylogenetic contexts--in haplogroups J1 and L3e--among 794 complete mtDNA sequences [citations omitted]. Therefore, the scenario that the threonine to alanine change in the haplogroup X background is indeed due to recurrence appears most plausible.
They also suggest that the haplotype X among the Altain people of Siberia is likely due to a relatively recent flow of genes from Eurasia, which may also have brought some of the other European haplotypes found among the Altains.

The possibility that haploytype X in Native Americans comes from recent admixture can be rules out on several grounds, especially the fact that haploytype X has been detected in pre-Columbian ancient DNA from the Americas (Malhi and Smith, 2002):

The most convincing evidence that haplogroup X is not the result of Viking or even more recent European admixture would be its presence in ancient Native Americans. Ancient samples from the Norris Farms site (Stone and Stoneking, 1998), the Windover site (Hauswirth et al., 1994), and the Amazon Basin (Ribeiro-Dos-Santos et al., 1996) exhibit the characteristic HVSI control region markers found in individuals assigned to haplogroup X, but they could not be confidently assigned that haplogroup because they were not tested for the AccI restriction site at np 14,465. We confirmed the presence of haplogroup X in one prehistoric sample excavated at a site on the Columbia River near Vantage, Washington and radiocarbon dated to 1,340  40 years BP.

Regardless of the origins of the major mtDNA haplotypes (A, B, C, D, and X), not all ancient Americans carried these haplotypes. Salzano (2002) reviews several studies of pre-Columbian mtDNA and notes that there have been samples found that cannot be classified within these groups. For samples from Florida (Windower), 69% could not be classified as A, B, C, or D. For samples from ancient Amazon Indians, 39% were outside the major haplotypes, and less than half of those could have been X (Riberos-dos-Santos, 1996 and 1997).

All in all, the expectations that studies in ancient DNA could provide new insights in the Amerindian evolutionary histories have not yet been fulfilled. It is not clear whether the new mtDNA sequences observed in prehistoric skeletons and mummies belong to lineages previously present but now extinct, or are methodological artifacts.
Given the existence of haplotype X (not directly related to Asian genes) and other mitochondrial haplotypes besides Asian A, B, C, and D in the ancient Americas, it is scientifically unsound to claim that DNA evidence points to Asia as the sole source of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas.

As an example of other haplotypes besides A, B, C, D, and X, and previously unknown haplotype has been found in the oldest ancient DNA sample from the Americas, see National Geographic's article, "First Americans Arrived Recently, Settled Pacific Coast, DNA Study Says," Feb. 2, 2007, which reports that DNA from a tooth sample over 10,000 years old does not belong to the five dominant haplotypes, and represents a previously unknown form that is related to a very small number of modern Native Americans along the Pacific Coast. This evidence may require significant revision of previously taught versions of the settling of the Americas.

Anti-Mormon Antics and More Haplotype X News

A recent post at Mormanity discusses an outstanding essay on the FAIRBlog, "Current Biology, SMGF, and Lamanites" by Dr. Ugo Perego, a scientist with a Ph.D. in human genetics and Director of Operations and Study Research Coordinator at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, Dr. Perego shows proper discipline in not making unfounded conclusions and in warning that much more work remains to be done in understanding Book of Mormon issues. Here is one example, where a potentially exciting report from other respected scientists is put in proper perspective:

Much can still be said about haplogroup X2 in the Americas. In our paper, two sub-branches of the Native American haplogroup X2a have been classified as X2a1 with an estimated age of 9200-9400 years and as X2a2 with an estimated age of 2300-3800 years. A possible third X2a sub-branch (X2a3?) was identified among the indigenous groups of British Columbia in Canada, but there is not sufficient data at this time to confirm this hypothesis. Furthermore, we reported in this paper the discovery of a previously unidentified X2 lineage in an Ojibwa sample -- which we named X2g -- that has never been previously observed in Native American populations or elsewhere.

Lastly, a paper published on PLoS One in 2008 (Shlush et al.) provides important clues about the possible origin of haplogroup X: "No population or geographic region has been identified to date, in which haplogroup X and its major subhaplogroups are found at both high frequency and high diversity, which could provide a potential clue as to their geographic origin. Here we suggest that the Druze population of northern Israel may represent just such a population."

Our paper in Current Biology does not discuss (and does not dismiss) a potential ancient origin for haplogroup X in the ancient Near East, as proposed by Shlush and Reidla (and their co-authors, including important names in population genetics such as Michael Hammer, Doron Behar, Toomas Kivisild, Richard Villems, Antonio Torroni, Alessandro Achilli, etc.), but we emphasize how this haplogroup marked a separate migratory event that characterized the history of Native American populations. Apart from anyone who believes haplogroup X to be the ultimate proof marking the arrival of Lehi’s group to the Americas (something that neither Woodward, nor myself advocate), the bottom line is that there is still much to research about the origin and dispersal of this and the other pre-Columbian lineages.(Emphasis added.)

So while there is data from respected scientists suggesting a relatively recent link between Israel and a DNA marker in the Americas, it is far too early to get overly excited. But it may be fair to say that those who say that DNA evidence utterly refutes the Book of Mormon are in an even less defensible position. Haplotype X may have some relevance to the debate, though that remains to be seen. It's still tentative, even speculative, but interesting.

In addition to providing a brief update about recent developments in relevant DNA studies, Dr. Ugo Perego's essay also shows some of the troubling tactics used by some anti-Mormons trying to use the DNA issue to attack the Church. It's very insightful and consistent with some of my experiences.

Throwing out the Pearl with the Oyster Shell:
The Likelihood of Discarding the Most Interesting Evidence To the index at the top

Let's assume for a moment that the Book of Mormon record is factual and that Lehi, Mulek, and their cohorts brought DNA from the Middle East into the New World around 600 B.C. Given that there were many people already in the hemisphere, then it is likely that modern traces of that Middle Eastern DNA will be found only rarely using techniques that require a pure, unbroken line of maternal or paternal descent from the tiny bands reported in the Book of Mormon. Those Native Americans with mtDNA directly inherited from Sariah, for example, or those with Y chromosomes directly inherited from Lehi, Mulek, Ishmael, or Zoram, may stand out as unusual outliers in genetic testing. In fact, it is possible that their DNA may resemble haplogroups typically found in Europe--especially if that is where the lost tribes of Israel ended up after the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom around 700 B.C. (Lehi was of the tribe of Joseph, not Judah, making him a fortunate remnant of one of the lost tribes of Israel. We may expect his DNA to resemble that of various peoples who may be found in Europe or Asia.)

Unfortunately, in their struggle to avoid samples contaminated with modern genetic matter and to avoid using Native American subjects who appear to have genes brought by Europeans after the time of Columbus, scientists may discard any evidence of relatively recent introduction of European haplogroups. And 600 B.C. is recent compared to the assumed time frame for settling of the Americas, which spans 12,000 to 40,000 years ago.

But whether the source is recent admixture or admixture from Lehi's group in 600 B.C., one point needs to be made that contradicts common claims of Book of Mormon critics: there IS direct evidence of Jewish ancestry among some modern Native Americans. Of course, this evidence will be assumed to be due to modern admixture--but can we really be sure of that?

One recent example is that of Carvajal-Carmona et al. (2000 - available online), who studied the Antioquian population of Colombia:

A number of the Antioquian Y-microsatellite haplotypes shown in table 4 carry large alleles at locus DYS388 (alleles with >14 repeats). These alleles are absent or have low frequencies in European and African populations but reach high frequencies in Middle Eastern populations (Kayser et al. 1997; Thomas et al. 2000). Large alleles were detected in the Basque and Catalan populations, at frequencies of 3.9% and 3.7%, respectively, and, in Antioquia, at a frequency of 16.2%. Among the Arabs, Berbers, Saharawis, and Tachelhits, such alleles were found at frequencies of 8.9%, 0%, 10%, and 11%, respectively. This suggests some Semitic ancestry for Antioquia and is consistent with the genetic distance analysis of table 3. Interestingly, haplotype 4, which carries a DYS388 allele with 16 repeats, corresponds to the Cohen modal haplotype (CMH) of Thomas et al. (1998). This haplotype has frequencies >10% among Jewish populations but seems to be rare in Arab populations and has been proposed as an indicator of Jewish ancestry (Thomas et al. 2000). Two other haplotypes (12 and 29) are one mutational step away from the CMH. Haplotypes 3 and 5 also match haplotypes detected among Jewish populations; they correspond to haplotypes 2 and 27 in Thomas et al. (2000). In that survey, Antioquian haplotype 3 was observed only among Sephardic Jews. These matches occur in haplogroup C and, on aggregate, imply that ~14% of the Antioquian haplotypes could have a Jewish ancestry.
This Jewish ancestry is assumed to be due to Jews living in the Iberian peninsula who came to the Americas with the Spaniards, but it is difficult to conclusively prove that given the lack of significant documentary evidence. But the blood types of the Antioquians points to heavy European influence (again apparently modern) and we know that Europeans are among their ancestors. But even if we grant that some of their genes came from modern Jews, do we have the tools to identify genes brought by a group like Lehi's in 600 B.C., if they have survived as mtDNA or Y-chromosomes? Would they not be classified as of modern origin or become part of a neglected "other" category? NOTE: I don't think the Antioquians have Y chromosomes from Lehi, but use them as an illustration of the reality of "Jewish" DNA in the Americas and the difficulty in properly identifying its source.

In studying the genetics of Native Americans, the problem with admixture is real, of course. European genes as well as African genes (Green et al., 2000) have been introduced since Columbus. But automatically discarding apparently "recent" genetic ties to Europe may be premature in some cases. To better understand this issue, below are several examples of how European-like genetic features are discarded because of fear of recent admixture. First, I quote from Forster et al. (1996), p. 936:

Three of these 574 sequences were discarded for the analyses because they represent obvious cases of admixture: one Chilean, already identified as an outlier by Horati et al. (1993), differs by only one unique mutation from a common European/Middle Eastern sequence, and a Haida, and a West Greenland Inuit (35 and 83 in Shields et al. 1993) are not found in any other American or Siberian sample but reveal two exact matches with two of the most-common European sequences.
Forster et al. (1996) also note that the criteria of Torroni et al. for identifying founding haplotypes could miss minor founding haplotypes (p. 938), a reminder that small groups of migrants are likely to be overlooked as scientists characterize the genetic origins of Native Americans, even when the unusual groups aren't thrown out.

Torroni et al. (1993b) discusses haplogroups that do not fit the 4 main haplogroups of Native American mtDNAs:

Haplotypes Am28, AM29, and AM74-76 lacked characteristic Amerind mutations and probably represent European mtDNAs. For example, haplotype Am28 was found in one Maya. . . . The same haplotype has been found in about 10% of Caucasian mtDNAs, and if haplotypes deriving from AM28 are included, the frequency of this group of haplotypes increases to about 30%.
Later, Torroni et al. (1995) take a less tentative stance in referring to their previous work: "The Maya haplotype (AM28) lacking Native American markers is of European origin." What was "probably" in their earlier paper is now stated in absolute terms, though no new evidences supports the bolder statement. They may be right, of course, but are they really sure?

Santos et al. (1999), already discussed above, provides another typical example. In the following quote, look how casually and quickly recent ties to Europe are discarded. It is understandable, but perhaps important evidence is conveniently overlooked:

The major Amerindian haplotype . . . is described here as haplotype 31. . . . Haplotype 10, differing from haplotype 31 only by [a single mutation], was very frequent (30%) in our Native American sample and was found exclusively among North American Indians; in addition, it was also observed in a Mongolian and four Indians. Haplotype 20, which is similar to haplotypes 10 and 31, was seen in a single North American Indians and in some populations from the central region of Siberia. It was particularly frequent in a sample of the rapidly disappearing Ket population (70%) and also was found in some Altaians (17.4%) and a single Mongolian. Haplotype 23, which is very different from haplotypes 31, 10, and 20, was seen in a single Na-Dene and could be a more recent haplotype from Asia, since it is most frequent in Mongolia (42%) and is also seen in many Siberians. . . . Haplotype 1, also similar to haplotype 10 and the most frequent in Europe (53%), is also present in India (14.5%) and was found in 20% of the Native Americans, exclusively in the samples collected for paternity tests in North America, but is absent from Siberia or central East Asia. European ancestry was confirmed for at least one of these [4] Native American samples with haplotype 1 in the paternity-test report. Therefore, the presence of haplotype 1 in North American Indians can be explained as a result of recent admixture with Europeans, whereas haplotypes 10, 20, and 23 cannot be explained in the same way, because they are absent from Europe.
One of four people with an unusual European haplotype could be shown to have some presumably modern European ancestry--how that was shown is not stated--and thus the authors dismiss all occurrences of this haplotype as being due to recent admixture. Was this ancestry strictly paternal, so that a Y-chromosome had been inherited from a European? Did the other 3 individuals with haplotype 1 also have paternal European ancestry? The authors may be right in their conclusion, but have other possibilities been considered carefully enough?

The risk of ignoring apparent outliers and the incomplete nature of the "Asia only" model for Native American origins is discussed by David A. McClellan (2003), assistant professor of integrative biology at Brigham Young University:

Another haplotype, C10, [Rickards et al., 1999] is found only among the Cayapa people of Ecuador, who possess it in relatively high frequencies (30 percent). C10 does not appear to be closely related to any other extant human haplotype, although it appears that it may be loosely related to haplogroup C to the exclusion of haplogroups B and A. At best, haplotype C10 represents a lineage that has a questionable origin.

Mitochondrial studies have also been performed with the remains of ancient Maya from the Postclassic period of a.d. 900-1521, just prior to European colonization. [González-Oliver, 2001] Findings include the identification of a single individual (1 out of 16) whose mitochondrial haplotype failed to correspond to any of the known extant haplogroups (A-D). Although another unidentified haplotype was isolated among contemporary Maya, it was discounted as the product of modern European admixture. [Torroni et al., 1992] However, the presence of a similarly unidentified haplotype in ancient Maya may call this conclusion into question.

Although the preponderance of mitochondrial genome data supports the hypothesis that the Americas were originally peopled by humans from eastern Asia, the exact location of the source population and the number of migration waves remains controversial, [Neel et al., 1994; Kolman et al., 1996; Bonatto and Salzano, 1997b] despite claims to the contrary. [Derenko, 2001] The presence of haplotypes X and C10 and the "unknown" Maya haplotypes (both ancient and modern), however, emphasize the fact that much that has been discovered is yet to be explained. A hypothesis for the diversity of Native American mitochondrial genome haplotypes that relies exclusively on an out-of-Asia origin falls short of a complete explanation.

There are further indications that the "Asia-only" model is incomplete, and that hints of non-Asian origins may be too easily ignored. For example, in the work of Karafet et al. (1999), several Y-chromosome haplogroups were studied. Interestingly, a minority of the Native Americans displayed haplogroup 4 (1 Cheyenne and 2 Zapotecs). This haplogroup was one of the two major haplogroups for Greeks and the most common one reported for Egyptians, but was absent from Asians, Eskimos, and other North Americans. The work of Hammer et al. (2000) shows that haplotype 4 is also one of the most common haplotypes among Jews. Several other haplotypes may link scattered Native American individuals with Africans or Europeans (including the Mediterranean), though the genes in question occur to a small degree in some Asian populations as well.

Speaking of haplotype 4 and 5, which are grouped as YAP+ haplotypes, the authors state the following:

Only two of four YAP+ haplotypes (i.e., 4 and 5) were present in our survey of Native Americans. Because these haplotypes are limited almost entirely to Africa and Europe, the presence of YAP+ haplotypes in the New World is most likely due to admixture between Native Americans and people of African and European descent. (p. 823)
How do we distinguish genes introduced from the Middle East since Columbus from those introduced after Columbus? The key may be to examine pre-Columbian human remains. Though extremely rare, such remains may ultimately answer the question. One study has been reported of such remains. It is that of Stone and Stoneking (1998), who investigated a burial site with many pre-Columbian skeletons dating to about 1300 A.D. Of 152 individuals, 102 could be assigned to one of the four primary haplogroups (A,B,C,D), and 6 "did not possess any of the characteristic markers and were designated as belonging to a group designated "other"." The remaining 44 samples did not yield enough DNA for analysis. The HV1 [hypervariable region I of the control region in the mtDNA] was sequenced in 52 individuals (34%) from the total sample.
The individuals included 12 with mtDNA classified as group A, 7 as group B, 25 as group C, 5 as group D, and 3 as "other." Twenty-five distinct lineages were found. Two of these lineages (2 and 25) were excluded from further analysis, as likely cases of contamination (despite multiple independent extractions of these samples). The sequence of lineage 25 (from burial 200) matched the sequence of the primary author (A.S.). The lineage 2 sequence was identical to one found in two Finnish individuals (Lahermo et al., 1996) and segregates with the reference sequence in phylogenic analyses (data not shown). Although this sequence does not match the author's sequence of that of the primary osteologist involved with the sample, this lineage may be the result of contamination from an unknown source. Additional investigation of the mtDNA sequences of individuals involved with the skeletal collection may reveal the possible source for this sequence. Lineage 25 was from the "other" group (as is the primary author), whereas extracts from the individual with lineage 2 did have the gain of the HaeIII site that characterizes haplogroup A in Native Americans; however, this mutation has also been found in Caucasians (Cann et al. 1987). (Stone and Stoneking, 1998, emphasis mine)
Fascinating! The authors describe great care in the extraction procedures used. They examined a string of 31 nucleotides, most of which are unchanged relative to a reference sample. Sample 24, rejected for having the same sequence as the author's, differs by only two mutations from the reference series and by only 1 mutation from line 11 that is grouped with haplogroup B. Line 25 differs by only one mutation from the line 11 as well and by only two mutations from the reference sequence. It's not impossible that either of these sequences labeled as "other" were genuine Native American sequences. But since one corresponds to two published Finnish nucleotide sequences, it assumed that contamination somehow occurred. But could it also be that there was some European blood that showed up in a rare DNA sequence?

Based on the information published in this article, and comparing it with that of Finnila (2001), I find that one of Finnila's Finnish individuals (#112) of haplogroup X differs from ten of Brown et al.'s (1998) haplogroup X Native Americans (NA 12-21) by only one or two mutations. Specifically, both the native Americans and the Finn have mutations relative to the Cambridge Reference Sequence in nucleotides at positions 73, 153, 195, 225, 263, 16183, 16189, 16223, and 16278. Brown does not appear to provide information about nucleotide 329, where the Finn has a mutation. The Finn has a mutation at position 226 that is found in none of Brown et al.'s Native American samples. Thus, based on the published information, there are nine shared mutations, one mutation in the Finn not found in the Native Americans, and one in the Finn for which I have no information. Differing by only one or two mutations when nine mutations are shared strikes me as interesting. To put this in perspective, there were three other Finns sharing haplogroup X with individual 112, and in spite of their common haplogroup, they still differed from individual 112 by either 4 or 5 mutations. Finns with other haplogroups differed from individual 112 by larger numbers of mutations, with some differing by more than 20 mutations.

Interestingly, I've encountered another example of a respected researcher encountering Finnish-like genes in Native Americans and ascribing that to presumably recent European admixture. Torroni and Wallace (1995) discuss the "other" haplogroups that don't fall within the primary mtDNA haplogroups A, B, C, and D, which have been found in over 3% of Native Americans. After dismissing the previously discussed unusual Mayan haplotype (Am28) as European, they make the following statements:

An analogous case of admixture with Europeans is represented by the "anomalous" Ojibwa and the Navajo mtDNAs (AM29 and AM74-76). All of these haplotypes are defined by both a DdeI site loss as nt [nucleotide] 1715 and the lack of a DdeI site at nt 10394. This association was not observed in any of 411 Siberians and 207 Asians, suggesting that this haplogroup is not of Asian ancestry. The European ancestry of the anomalous Ojibwa and Navajo mtDNAs was initially suggested by the presence of two similar haplotypes in 2 of 175 Caucasians from North America and recently has been confirmed by the finding of mtDNAs with the same characteristic mutations in the Finnish population (author's unpublished data). (Torroni et al., 1995, p. 1235, references deleted, emphasis mine)
As if that weren't puzzling enough, a study of diabetes in Mexican Americans again points to a possible Finnish connection (Horikawa et al., 2000), though European admixture is certainly present. Here is the abstract:
Type 2 or non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) is the most common form of diabetes worldwide, affecting approximately 4% of the world's adult population. It is multifactorial in origin with both genetic and environmental factors contributing to its development. A genome-wide screen for type 2 diabetes genes carried out in Mexican Americans localized a susceptibility gene, designated NIDDM1, to chromosome 2. Here we describe the positional cloning of a gene located in the NIDDM1 region that shows association with type 2 diabetes in Mexican Americans and a Northern European population from the Botnia region of Finland. This putative diabetes-susceptibility gene encodes a ubiquitously expressed member of the calpain-like cysteine protease family, calpain-10 (CAPN10). This finding suggests a novel pathway that may contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes.
Are the repeated genetic connections with Finns just coincidence? Torroni et al. (1995) find a close tie between some Finns and some unusual mtDNAs in Native Americans, allegedly "confirming" that they are due to recent admixture with Europeans. Stone and Stoneking (1998) investigate a pre-Columbian burial site and, in spite of extremely cautious procedures, feel that contamination from an unknown source must have occurred in one of their samples because it shows a sequence identical to that reported in two Finnish individuals, even though this sequence did not match that of the two researchers most likely to have accidentally contributed genetic matter. A study of diabetes suggests an association between Mexican Americans and some Finns. Finally, my comparison of data in Finnila et al. (2001) and Brown et al. (1998) shows that the connections between one Finnish individual and several modern X haplotypes in Native Americans may be surprisingly close, even though recent admixture is not suspected.

The origins of the Finns, by the way, are rather obscure. Some have speculated about lost tribes of Israel, but a Central Asian origin may be more plausible. If there is a connection with Native Americans, it may be through the ancient Jaredites rather than Hebrews--or it could be through the Vikings long after Book of Mormon times. For now, we don't know enough to make any firm conclusions.

The unusual outliers we encounter remind us of the significant diversity in genetic markers. Statements based on averages and typical features of groups may obscure important details, such as the similarity between a Finn and several Native Americans. And if there were a link between modern Finns and pre-Columbian settlers in the New World--such as both sharing genes from the lost tribe of Joseph, to give a radical example--would such a link ever be found if evidence for it were immediately but erroneously discarded due to apparent modern admixture? I'm not saying the Finn's have anything to do with Native American populations--but they might.

The problem in applying DNA analysis to the Book of Mormon goes beyond the likelihood of discarding the most relevant evidence. There is also the possibility of attributing evidence of pre-Columbian migrations to recent admixture. Worse, there is the possibility of missing the date of entry of the most relevant genes, and thus eliminating them from the scope of the Book of Mormon, as we shall discuss below.

All this is compounded by the fact that researchers are understandably interested in explaining the dominant genetic origins of Native Americans, which will likely correspond to the dominant population groups that were already on the continent when Lehi's little boatload of people landed. There is typically little interest in understanding or even studying the origins of unusual haplotypes in Native Americans. For example, Bonatto and Salzano (1997a), in concluding that the four major mtDNA haplotypes likely derived from a single Asian migration, felt that other less common haplotypes could be safely ignored:

We agree that some additional founding haplogroups (such as group X from Forster et al. 1996; also see Bailliet et al. 1994; Merriwether and Ferrell 1996) might exist, besides the four major ones studied here. However, they constitute only ~10% of the sequences now found in the Americas and, because of their very small sample size, could not be analyzed in the study. Since we analyzed each haplogroup separately, and since the number of haplogroups was not a relevant parameter, including these putatively additional founding haplogroups should not significantly change the results presented here.
Salzano (2002) lists 7 biallelic haplotypes for Y chromosomes in Native Americans in his Table 9. He states that haplotypes 5 through 7 "occur in low frequencies, and since they present high prevalences in European or African populations, may be due to interethnic gene flow." But these haplotypes occur in Eskimos, Na-Denes, and Amerinds of North American, as well as in natives of Central America and South America. Can we safely ignore them because they are also characteristic of Old World peoples outside of Asia?

As a further characteristic example of the exclusion of "other" DNA types, Malhi et al. (2002) investigated the mtDNA haplogroup identities of 1,612 Native Americans. They state that:

Individuals whose mtDNAs did not belong to one of the five Native American haplogroups were not included in this analysis. Although it is possible that one or more of these individuals possess previously undocumented founding Native American mtDNA types, previous studies indicate that the frequency of "other" mtDNA types is very low and that most--or all--of these result from recent admixture (Torroni et al. 1993b, 1994; Huoponen et al. 1997; Smith et al. 1999).
An excellent discussion of the very real problem of contamination of ancient DNA samples is provided by Kolman and Tuross (2000), who also provide an interesting example in which pre-Columbian genetic material from a Native American appears to provide reproducible evidence of European origins. In spite of numerous efforts to exclude contamination, this result, identically reproduced in multiple careful trials, is presented as a case of "obvious" contamination because it was non-Asian:
The data presented here can be used to illustrate the dangers of imprudent inclusion of data. The DNA sequence identified in sample 5 had never been detected in our laboratory or in New World indigenous populations. All associated extraction and PCR controls were negative. Multiple extractions resulted in the same RFLP/deletion haplotype. Therefore, it could be proposed that this haplotype represents a new founding lineage for the New World. However, the fact that this haplotype is found at high frequency in European populations (17%, Richards et al., 1996) and is not found in presumably ancestral Asian populations argues against this interpretation and against the inclusion of this sequence in a NewWorld database.

In total, seven different non-New World sequences were identified in the current study. They are most likely all European in origin and may represent a minimum of seven independent sources of contamination. . . .

In sum, there is no easy, objective method of identifying contaminating sequences other than to painstakingly analyze them within the genetic framework of the ancient population under study.

The conclusion is understandable, if one is constrained by the paradigm that all ancient Native Americans must have DNA originating from Asia. But when an ancient human's DNA comes up as European, in trial after trial with great precautions taken to prevent contamination, and then that data is simply excluded as a fine example of the dangers of contamination because it is not Asian, what chance do we have to find non-Asian genes in ancient human samples from the Americas? Ancient DNA that does not fit the out-of-Asia paradigm is repeatedly discarded from consideration because of "obvious" contamination.

There is no evidence in the paper by Kolman and Tuross that any of the other samples discarded for "contamination" had contamination from any of the researchers conducting the study. The approach appears to be that anything unexpected will be discarded as due to contamination. Is it any surprise that this approach - apparently a common approach - consistently suppresses surprises, surprises like the presence of non-Asian groups in ancient America?

Further work with the typically neglected outliers still needs to be done, and done without instantly assuming that modern contamination or admixture is the source of genes that appear to have a non-Asian origin. While contamination can be a serious problem, it is still possible to get good results with ancient DNA if proper procedures are followed, as shown by Gilbert et al. (2003). More recently, Matthew Spencer and Christopher J. Howe (Spencer and Rowe, 2004) have established statistical tools and recommended procedures to help researchers determine the probability that an amplified DNA sequence from an ancient sample actually corresponds to ancient DNA or modern contamination. Their discussion of the problem of contamination is also helpful.

Guthrie (2000/2001) notes examples in which genetic data were excluded due to incorrectly assumed admixture:

There may be no clear marker for European ancestry among the "classical" genetic variants, although a high frequency of the Rhesus cde (r) allele might qualify. CS [Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994)] also considered immunoglobin f;b [sic], adenylate kinase 1, and ABO type B, when found together, to indicate Caucasoid admixture in eastern North America [ibid., p. 337]. Occurrences among indigenous Americans of cde or A or B of the ABO system were once attributed to recent admixture and databases were "corrected" accordingly. It is now understood that some of these unexpected alleles arrived in antiquity. Mummies from Paracas, Peru, possessed both A and B antigens (Allison et al., 1976, 1978). . . . Well over 40% of the indigenous American samples that Mourant [1976] and CS [Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994)] listed have at least some cde, and these included isolated tribes with no evidence of recent European or African admixture. The A antigen is common among Na-Dene and Eskimo populations, and B appears at significant frequencies among Eskimos, South Andeans, and others such as speakers of Hokan and Chibchan-Paez languages.
There is a real risk of errantly disregarding genetic data by assuming recent admixture, when in fact a gene with ties to the Old World may have arrived well before Columbus. And part of the difficulty is the uncertainty in assigning a date to the entry of a gene.

Uncertainty in Dating a Haplotype To the index at the top

From the writings of anti-LDS critics on alt.religion.mormon and in their Web pages, there seems to be a serious misunderstanding about the ability of scientists to ascribe a date to DNA. It's as if they think that scientists can just look at the mtDNA or Y-chromosomes of a Native American and deduce when and where a particular trait originated. They have assumed that scientists could readily tell the difference between, say, a European-like gene brought over in 1600 A.D. versus one from 600 B.C. This is not the case at all! DNA provides no intrinsic date or origin information, as everyone should agree. Estimates of the time of entry of a haplotype into a population requires numerous assumptions and crude measurements involving mutation rates and comparisons with other groups. If there was a single common ancestor for two DNA sequences differing by a certain number of mutations, and if we assume that the differing mutations occurred at a known, constant rate, than a very rough estimate can be made of the time that the two groups have been separated and "evolving" without sharing each others genes. But that separation time does not necessarily correspond to the time that one group entered any particular part of the world. Two groups could be separated in Asia before one migrates to the New World.

Much of the analysis assumes that diversity within a haplogroup is due to mutations occurring at slow, predictable rates that occurred since migration to the New World. However, Malhi et al. (2002) note that, "If multiple haplotypes within a haplogroup were successful colonizers of the New World, modern values of within-haplogroup diversity would overestimate the accumulated variation since contact." They further note that in the HVSI portion of the control region of mtDNA used to make estimates of dates, the entire region itself may be hypervariable, resulting "in a nonlinear accumulation of mutations within a haplogroup, thereby further impairing the utility of molecular diversity for the dating of the colonization event. Diversity estimates are also strongly affected by both sampling and population historic and demographic events that have occurred since colonization."

Further, comparison of haplogroups does not reveal travel routes. Finding DNA in a small group in southwest Siberia that resembles DNA from many Native Americans DOES NOT indicate who travelled where and when. Even if we know that the two groups have been separated by 12,000, years, for example, it is possible that the small Siberian group descended from ancient New World peoples who migrated to Siberia.

To illustrate the impossibility of precisely dating events with DNA analysis alone, consider this statement from Karafet et al. (1999):

Haplotypes constructed from Y-chromosome markers were used to trace the origins of Native Americans. Our sample consisted of 2,198 males from 60 global populations, including 19 Native American and 15 indigenous North Asian groups. . . . Contra previous findings based on Y- chromosome data, our new results suggest the possibility of more than one Native American paternal founder haplotype. We postulate that, of the nine unique haplotypes found in Native Americans, haplotypes 1C and 1F are the best candidates for major New World founder haplotypes, whereas haplotypes 1B, 1I, and 1U may either be founder haplotypes and/or have arrived in the New World via recent admixture. Two of the other four haplotypes (YAP+ haplotypes 4 and 5) are probably present because of post-Columbian admixture, whereas haplotype 1G may have originated in the New World, and the Old World source of the final New World haplotype (1D) remains unresolved. The contrasting distribution patterns of the two major candidate founder haplotypes in Asia and the New World, as well as the results of a nested cladistic analysis, suggest the possibility of more than one paternal migration from the general region of Lake Baikal to the Americas.
Those findings illustrate an important point. Using state-of-the-art techniques, Karafet et al. (1999) were unable to state whether haplogroups ("haplotypes" in their paper) 1B, 1I, and 1U were founder haplogroups (entered the New World many thousands of years ago) or have arrived in the New World via recent admixture. YAP+ haplogroups 4 and 5, with strong ties to European genes, are said to be "probably present because of post-Columbian admixture"--but that is an assumption, not the result of any precise dating methodology. Interestingly, of the Old World population groups studied by Karafet et al., those with the highest concentration of YAP+ haplogroups were in the Mediterranean. Could it be that the YAP+ haplogroups in the New World were due to admixture, but pre-Columbian admixture from Middle Easterners? That possibility cannot be ruled out.

Karafet et al. also found that haplogroup 1C "was also widely distributed in North, Central, and South America. In the Old World, the highest frequencies of haplotype 1C were found in the Kets (83.3%) and the Selkups (76.2%)" (p. 821). However, the second highest Old World frequency for haplogroup 1C was in Britain, with 68.8% frequency. The European group as a whole had this haplogroup at only a 37.7% frequency. Could there be a tie to Britain?

An Inflated Mutation Rate? Perhaps a Critical Problem To the index at the top

Perhaps even more important than the inability to precisely specify the origin a given DNA sequences is the potential for gross error in the dating methods used to relate differing DNA sequences. When I first noted that at least some of the dates ascribed to separation of human DNA groups was based on the mutation rate that would explain the divergence of humans and chimps from a common ancestor 4 million years ago (e.g., see Ward, 1991, p. 8723), I began to wonder just how much verifiable science went into the estimated dates of separation of various human lines. Could human lines be mutating much faster than had been assumed or estimated? If there are major errors in the mutation rates that are used to date genetic separation of human groups, then our application of the DNA evidence to New World origins could be wildly misleading. In fact, there is reason to doubt the standard mutation rates used.

I first encountered this evidence on a Web page by David A. Plaisted, "Mitochondrial DNA Mutation Rates," which refers to the work of Parsons et al. (1997), who provide the following summary:

The rate and pattern of sequence substitutions in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region (CR) is of central importance to studies of human evolution and to forensic identity testing. Here, we report a direct measurement of the intergenerational substitution rate in the human CR. We compared DNA sequences of two CR hypervariable segments from close maternal relatives, from 134 independent mtDNA lineages spanning 327 generational events. Ten substitutions were observed, resulting in an empirical rate of 1/33 generations, or 2.5/site/Myr. This is roughly twenty-fold higher than estimates derived from phylogenetic analyses. This disparity cannot be accounted for simply by substitutions at mutational hot spots, suggesting additional factors that produce the discrepancy between very near-term and long-term apparent rates of sequence divergence. The data also indicate that extremely rapid segregation of CR sequence variants between generations is common in humans, with a very small mtDNA bottleneck. These results have implications for forensic applications and studies of human evolution.
Further, the authors (Parsons et al., 1997) state:
The observed substitution rate reported here is very high compared to rates inferred from evolutionary studies. A wide range of CR substitution rates have been derived from phylogenetic studies, spanning roughly 0.025-0.26/site/Myr, including confidence intervals. A study yielding one of the faster estimates gave the substitution rate of the CR hypervariable regions as 0.118 +- 0.031/site/Myr. Assuming a generation time of 20 years, this corresponds to ~1/600 generations and an age for the mtDNA MRCA of 133,000 y.a. Thus, our observation of the substitution rate, 2.5/site/Myr, is roughly 20-fold higher than would be predicted from phylogenetic analyses. Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock would result in an age of the mtDNA MRCA of only ~6,500 y.a., clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans. Even acknowledging that the MRCA of mtDNA may be younger than the MRCA of modern humans, it remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years.

While our results are at odds with those of phylogenetic studies, they are in excellent agreement with a recent report that also directly measured the CR substitution rate." (op. cit. p. 365; footnotes omitted; the report mentioned in the last paragraph is Howell, N. et al., in Am. J. Hum. Genet. 59, 501-509, 1996).

Plaisted notes that the control region is an unimportant part of human DNA, as far as we know (part of the "junk DNA" that does not code for proteins), so the observed high rate of mutation is not likely to be reduced by an order of magnitude in effect by sudden death caused by 90% or so of the mutations being harmful. The mutations in the unimportant control region DNA are likely to persist from generation to generation. The bottom line is that human mutation in that region occurs much faster than we have previously assumed. See also Gibbons (1998), who states:
Mitochondrial DNA appears to mutate much faster than expected, prompting new DNA forensics procedures and raising troubling questions about the dating of evolutionary events.
Some people are using the work of Parsons et al. to reduce the estimated age of "mitochondrial Eve" from 200,000 years ago to, oh, about 6500 years ago. See, for example, the Web page at http://www.mhrc.net/mitochondria.htm. I remain skeptical of this approach and am much more comfortable with the analysis of Rana et al. (1999), where I feel the reality of fossil evidence is better understood.

Nevertheless, based on what Parsons et al. have demonstrated, dates of genetic entry in the New World based on genetic evidence may be off by an order of magnitude. If this holds up, then haplogroup X and other European haplogroups X in the Americas really may point to a Middle Eastern entry from about the time of Lehi, rather than 12,000 to 30,000 years ago. Time will tell.

Recently, Sean D. Pitman, M.D., published an article (Pitman, 2003) exploring the scientific problems behind using DNA analysis as a clock to date human origins. He summarizes a variety of scientific findings pertaining to mutation rates and the methods used to date DNA. I highly recommend his article as a resource on this topic. It is available at http://naturalselection.0catch.com/Files/dnamutationrates.html.

The above-mentioned work of Howell et al. (1996) merits further mention. Here is the abstract:

The results of an empirical nucleotide-sequencing approach indicate that the evolution of the human mitochondrial noncoding D-loop is both more rapid and more complex than is revealed by standard phylogenetic approaches. The nucleotide sequence of the D-loop region of the mitochondrial genome was determined for 45 members of a large matrilineal Leber hereditary optic neuropathy pedigree. Two germ-line mutations have arisen in members of one branch of the family, thereby leading to triplasmic descendants with three mitochondrial genotypes. Segregation toward the homoplasmic state can occur within a single generation in some of these descendants, a result that suggests rapid fixation of mitochondrial mutations as a result of developmental bottlenecking. However, slow segregation was observed in other offspring, and therefore no single or simple pattern of segregation can be generalized from the available data. Evidence for rare mtDNA recombination within the D-loop was obtained for one family member. In addition to these germ-line mutations, a somatic mutation was found in the D-loop of one family member. When this genealogical approach was applied to the nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial coding regions, the results again indicated a very rapid rate of evolution.

In my opinion, Howell et al. (1996) show that common assumptions about mtDNA mutation do not hold up. Not only can the rate of change be faster than expected, but recombination of mtDNA can occur (meaning that some mtDNA from the father is inherited). Though rare (see Elson et al., 2001), such a possibility could jeopardize the accuracy of conclusions drawn from mtDNA work.

The issue of unusually frequent mutations in mtDNA also arose in a study of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and family members, conducted by Ivanov et al. (1996) and discussed by Gibbons (1998). Both the tsar and his brother inherited two mtDNA sequences from their mother, a mutation-induced condition called heteroplasmy. Heteroplasmy was assumed to be a rare and unusual event, but "new studies suggest that [it] may in fact be a frequent event," found in at least 10% of humans, according to the summary of Gibbons (1998). Such frequent mutations may invalidate the assumptions behind previous DNA-based dating, according to Gibbons.

More recently, Denver et al. (2000) conducted a study of mtDNA mutations in one of biologists' favorite creatures, Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode which, in spite of its simplicity, shares many essential biological features of relevance to human biology. Using a long-term study of mutations in these creatures, they found that the mtDNA mutation rate was roughly 100 times greater than previously used rates based on indirect estimates. The authors state:

The mutational patterns observed in the MA lines of C. elegans are similar to those associated with human mitochondrial diseases, including the replacement of highly conserved amino acids, large deletions, and the high incidence of frameshift mutations at coding homopolymer stretches. The mitochondrial mutations isolated in this study can serve as models for future studies on the fitness effects of mitochondrial genetic disorders. Furthermore, the high rate and strongly biased pattern of mtDNA mutations detected here increase the probability of parallel mutations. The high potential for homoplasmy must be considered when using mtDNA for evolutionary studies and when investigating the occurrence of recombination in mitochondrial genomes. (pp. 2343-2344)
Multiple recent studies point to the possibility that human mutation rates in mtDNA are much greater than previously supposed. Such studies, typically based on direct measurement of mutation rates, may be more accurate for dating the divergence of human haplogroups than anything based on the assumption of steady evolution from a common ancestor with other primates--even if basic evolutionary assumptions are true.

The uncertainty in dating has been further compounded, in my opinion, by mtDNA analysis of Cheddar Man (see Kahn and Gibbons, 1997). Rana et al. (1999) make this observation about the analysis:

To add even more weight to the finding [that Neanderthals are not part of human evolutionary lineage], scientists have also analyzed mtDNA from an ancient modern human skeleton. A British team analyzed a portion of mtDNA in a 10,000 year old human skeleton found near Cheddar, England. The mtDNA from this skeleton differed from that of modern Europeans by only one nucleotide base pair--essentially identical to that of modern humans. The lack of "evolution" for humans over the last 10,000 years stands in sharp contrast to the differences seen between modern humans and Neanderthals.
So while mtDNA rates observed in modern humans is higher than expected, analysis of mtDNA in an ancient human has shown almost no sign of evolutionary change (mutations) over a 10,000 year period. At the moment, it seems fair to question that dating of human origins or human migrations based on DNA analysis alone. For example, Nei and Glazko (2002) state that "mtDNA evolves so erratically that the estimates obtained using mtDNA appear unreliable" and they therefore turn to analysis of nuclear proteins instead, though this also requires calibration points based on the assumption that distinct species evolved from common ancestors with a known divergence date. Though they refer to their own unpublished data to support the claim that mtDNA dating is unreliable, they also cite Gissi et al. (2000), who found that mtDNA mutation rates appear to vary unpredictably between orders and even closely related species. However, Gissi et al. also conclude that the variation between mammals was low, with a variability of no more than a factor of 1.8 between rates.

To be fair, some previously published concerns about dating due to recombination in mtDNA were due to errant work of one scientist, Erika Hagelberg, who published a paper indicating that rapid mtDNA changes in some Pacific Islanders must have been due to recombination (see Strauss, 1999, for a discussion of implications). Bryan Sykes, in his popular book, The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001, pp. 155-168), delves into the tense conflict between Hagelberg and him, in which Hagelberg finally retracted her conclusions since the apparent mutations were due to a technical error on her part. Sykes argues that the many previously expressed concerns over dating with mtDNA (see, for example, Strauss, 1999) were ill-founded, and that mtDNA dating has proven reliable after all. On the other hand, there are other issues that Sykes does not address, such as the observation with electron microscopy that male mitochondria can enter an egg and possibly recombine with mtDNA from the mother (see Strauss, 1999).

It is not just non-coding mtDNA where unexpectedly high mutation rates have been encountered. Adam Eyre-Walker and Peter D. Keightley's article, "High Genomic Deleterious Mutation Rates in Hominids," published in the prestigious journal, Nature (Eyre-Walker and Keightley, 1999) shows that mutations in the coding DNA of the nucleus occur at a much higher rate than previously realized, so high that it poses serious problems for standard evolutionary models. The reported conservative estimate is 4.2 mutations per person per generation, with 38% being deleterious--though the actual number might be significantly higher. While I do not think that this study calls Y-chromosome analysis directly into question, it seems to require that human genes are not as old as previously assumed. I recommend the online report of Rana et al. (1999) for further information on human origins and DNA analysis. Regarding the work of Eyre-Walker and Keightley, Rana et al. state:

The authors had to rely upon a rare association of mutations, termed synergistic epistasis to explain why the numerous hypothesized deleterious mutations have not overwhelmed our genome. Instead of postulating the obvious (that the human genome is not as old as evolution would teach), evolutionists must rely upon the improbable to retain the evolutionary paradigm.
Eyre-Walker's and Keightley's finding regarding deleterious mutations in human genes was strengthened by the work of Nachman and Crowell (2000). They estimated a mutation rate for humans based on the genetic differences between chimpanzees and humans and based on an assumed initial population size of 10,000, an assumed divergence time of 5 million years, and a generation time of 20 years. If evolution produced chimps and man from a common ancestor according to these assumptions, calculated apparent mutation rates may range from 2 x 10-7 per nucleotide per generation for transitions at certain sites (CpG sites) to 2 x 10-9 for other types of mutations (length mutations), with an estimate of average mutation rate being estimated at about 2.5 x 10-8 per nucleotide per generation. The total mutation rate for humans would be about 175 new mutations in human DNA per generation (the calculated range would be from 91 to 238). The roughly estimated deleterious mutation rate U is about 3, meaning that there typically may be 3 harmful mutations per generation in humans, obtained by using a probably low estimate of 1.7% of the genome being functional ("subject to constraint"), giving the deleterious mutation rate of 175 x 0.017 = about 3. This value is nearly twice as high as the U value of 1.6 obtained by Eyre-Walker and Keightley (1999). In light of their calculations, Nachman and Crowell (2000) point out a problem for evolutionary theory:
The high deleterious mutation rate in humans presents a paradox. If mutations interact multiplicatively, the genetic load associated with such a high U would be intolerable in species with a low rate of reproduction [references omitted]. The reduction in fitness (i.e., the genetic load) due to deleterious mutations with multiplicative effects is given by 1 - e-U. For U = 3, the average fitness is reduced to 0.05, or put differently, each female would need to produce 40 offspring for 2 to survive and maintain the population at current size.
As a possible solution for the problem, Nachman and Crowell also appeal to the hypothesized mechanism of synergistic epistasis, wherein each additional mutation leads to a larger decrease in relative fitness, allowing accumulated mutations to be removed more readily by natural selection. However, little is known about this speculative mechanism and it may be an example of wishful thinking. It is reasonable to question the framework of evolutionary biology if the expected mutation rate is likely to lead to destructive levels of harmful mutations that accumulated in a species. The purely evolutionary paradigm is not fully consistent with the data.

What do we know about the mutation rate in Y chromosomes? In spite of a high mutation rate in coding DNA overall, the mutation rate of Y chromosomes is generally assumed to be known and to be small. For example, a rate of 1.5 x 10-4 for tetranucleotide loci was reported by Jin et al. (1994). In a study of Native American Y chromosomes, Underhill et al. (1996) concluded that the appearance of a mutation shared by many Native Americans and not shared outside of the Americas probably occurred about 30,000 years ago, providing a date for an ancestral population in agreement with mtDNA studies. However, they noted that Weber and Wong (1993) obtained a higher mutation rate of 2.1 x 10-3 which, if used in their study, would date the mutation to 2147 years ago, "which obviously represents an underestimate." The authors state that, "Knowledge of the mutation rate of this particular tetranucleotide would be important for validating this dating." We must realize that estimates of dates ascribed to Native American DNA types may be wildly incorrect, and that calculations leading to estimates in a Book of Mormon time frame will not be given a chance because that would "obviously represent an underestimate."

While further work needs to be done, it may be that the mutation rate for Y chromosomes is and always has been low, allowing for accurate dating of divergence in paternal lines. Such methods point to very ancient entry of founders in the Americas. (Indeed, Sykes states that Y-chromosome dating methods have generally validated mtDNA dating methods (Sykes, 2001, pp. 193-194)--but both sets of dating methods are based on evolutionary assumptions that naturally favor very old dates, in my opinion.) For example, Bianchi et al. (1998) directly estimated the mutation rate in Y-chromosomes by looking at 1,743 sets of DNA from father-son pairs and combined that with other data in the literature to yield a mutation rate of .0012. They applied this rate to estimate the age of a founding haplogroup in Native American DNA they call OA, a haplogroup shared by 5.7% of Native Americans, a haplogroup involving several mutations, including a mutation of C to T in the DYS199 allele which is found in many Native Americans but not in other populations. Using the estimated mutation rate and the existence of other Native American haplotypes that appear to be derived by mutations from a founding OA haplotype, the estimated time that the OA haplogroup has been in the New World--the time required for mutations to produce the divergent haplotypes--is about 22,770 years (minimum 13,500 years, maximum 58,700 years).

Bianchi et al. provide date estimates that appear to nicely fit standard Bering Strait theories. However, it is fair to question the accuracy of the mutation rate they obtain. There were zero relevant mutations in the father-son pairs they examined (something encountered in a different study by Dorit et al., 1995, and discussed by Pääbo et al., 1995). To obtain a mutation rate that they were comfortable with, they turned to other sets of data:

Thus, the rate of mutation [from the father-son pairs analyzed by Bianchi et al.] was 0, with a 95% upper confidence-interval limit of .0025. Two other direct estimations of mutation rates for Y-specific microsatellites have been reported in the literature. Heyer et al. (1997) found three mutations in nine Y-specific microsatellite loci (which include the seven loci analyzed in the present report) and in 213 independent meiotic events; this combination of loci and meioses represents a total of 1,917 generations. In addition, Kayser et al. (1997) found two DYS19 slippage mutation events in 626 father-son pairs. If we pool the data from the present report with the data from the reports by Heyer et al. (1997) and Kayser et al. (1997), the average mutation rate is .0012, with 95% Poisson confidence-interval limits of .00046 - .0028.
The estimated mutation rate is based on 5 apparent mutations grouped from several studies. I doubt if the sample size is large enough to provide real accuracy. One can also question whether the mutation rates in modern Caucasians (all of the father-son pairs Bianchi et al. observed were Caucasian) really applies to ancient New World populations. The small handful of mutations that Bianchi et al. study would have required 22,700 years if they occurred at a low, steady, random rate. On the other hand, it is possible that the mutations occurred in a few closely spaced steps. There is a possibility that environmental factors (UV exposure, pollutants, diet, exposure to radioactive minerals, etc.) may have been responsible for high bursts of mutations for some groups in ancient times, leading to mutations at much higher rates than we see today. (Perhaps all the mutagens from ancient flame-broiled mastodon resulted in mutation rates hundreds of times higher than see in modern humans.) While the dating methods for Y-chromosomes and mtDNA may have been done fairly and reasonably, the assumptions built into them are open to question.

Ruiz-Linares et al. (1999) studied Y-chromosomes in Colombia with improved methods and found evidence that appears to challenge the conclusions of those who claim that Amerind genes show evidence of only a single migration to the New World well over 20,000 years ago. According to their abstract:

Recently, Y chromosome markers have begun to be used to study Native American origins. Available data have been interpreted as indicating that the colonizers of the New World carried a single founder haplotype. However, these early studies have been based on a few, mostly complex polymorphisms of insufficient resolution to determine whether observed diversity stems from admixture or diversity among the colonizers. Because the interpretation of Y chromosomal variation in the New World depends on founding diversity, it is important to develop marker systems with finer resolution.
Their more refined methods pointed to two founding migrations at later dates than previously supposed, estimated to be between 5,675 and 18,462 years for one group, and 9,334 and 11,456 years ago for another group. Recognizing that these dates are much less than the dates obtained from mtDNA, they simply hint that their numbers may be biased downward by their exclusive use of Colombian samples, but offer little reason to support this hopeful suggestion. (If Y-chromosome evidence can sustain a migration on the order of 5,000 years ago, we may be able to consider evidence of the Jaredites in the Americas--a people that Hugh Nibley has suggested were of Asiatic origin many decades before DNA evidence was available.)

On a more global scale, the recent Y chromosome work of Thomson et al. (2000) may require a further revision to previously proposed dates for the most recent common male ancestor of humans. Prior work had proposed dates greater than 100,000 years (sometimes greater than 500,000 years), but improved methods applied by Thomson put the date closer to 50,000 years. But even this is based on an assumed evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees at 5 million years ago. If chimps and humans were created using different pathways (but common building blocks), then the assumption is incorrect and the dates obtained are meaningless. As the date for a common ancestor for all humans gets moved forward, the date for entry of founding chromosomes into the Americas could be expected to follow.

Clearly, we must wait for further refinements, even if we tentatively accept the conclusions of these studies at the moment.

Finally, mtDNA mutation may not be the result of neutral mutations, as is often assumed, but may be subject to the influence of natural selection, possibly challenging the accuracy of dating techniques. One interesting discussion of this point is offered by John Woodmorappe in his essay, "Upsetting Pet Theories: Surprising New Evidence that Molecular Clocks Can Run Very Fast," which discusses two scientific publications that point to the reality of natural selection in mtDNA and the possibility that this may result in inflated mtDNA dates.

Other Problems in mtDNA Analysis To the index at the top

An excellent page on mtDNA analysis is comes from a FAQ page at TalkOrigins.org at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mtDNA.html. An excerpt follows:
The use of mitochondrial mtDNA to investigate human history is not without drawbacks.

The rate of mtDNA mutation is not well known. A study by Parsons et al. (1997) found a rate 20 times higher than that calculated from other sources. In an article reviewing mtDNA research, Strauss (1999a) reports that mtDNA mutation rates differ in some groups of animals, and can even vary dramatically in single lineages. Although there are many agreements, some divergence dates for modern animals calculated from mtDNA do not match with what is known from the fossil record. There are suggestions from a few sources that paternal mtDNA can sometimes be inherited, which could affect analyses based on mtDNA.

In 1999 Awadalla et al. published a study suggesting that mtDNA could sometimes be inherited from fathers. If mtDNA is inherited only from mothers, the correlation between different mutations should not depend on how far apart on the genome they were. Instead, their measurements showed that mutations at distant sites on the mtDNA genome were less likely to be correlated than nearby mutations, suggesting that mtDNA from mothers and fathers could sometimes get mixed. However, there is no explanation so far as to how this recombination could be occurring, and the possibility that other phenomena could be causing this effect has not yet been disproved. If it occurs, mixing would mean that the dates from current mtDNA studies would be too old. If mixing is common enough, it could even mean that there was no mitochondrial Eve, because different parts of the mtDNA molecule would have different histories. (Awadalla et al. 1999, Strauss 1999b) Other studies, however, have contradicted these results and argued for strictly maternal mtDNA inheritance (Elson et al., 2001).

The possibility of paternally inherited mtDNA was fortified with a recent report in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine by Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing entitled "Paternal Inheritance of Mitochondrial DNA" (Schwartz and Vissing, 2002). They report a case study in which a 28-year-old man was found to have a mutation in his mtDNA that was paternal in origin and was found in about 90% of the patient's muscle DNA. This is surely a rare event, but it does point to the possibility of unusual events in mtDNA transmission.

With both mtDNA and Y-chromosome analysis, we need to remember that there are multiple scenarios that can explain the observed results. Barbujani and Bertorelle (1998) explain:

One difficulty with modern genes lies in the fact that any given pattern of variation may potentially be explained by several different evolutionary phenomena. A cline or gradient, for example, may reflect adaptation to variable environments, or a population expansion at one moment in time, or continuous gene flow between groups that initially differed in allele frequencies. However, it is possible to discard at least some implausible models by jointly analyzing many loci (selection tends to affect single genes, whereas demographic changes determine similar patterns across the genome), and by exploiting nongenetic information, such as archeological and paleobiological data.
Thus, DNA evidence on its own must be approached with a recognition that several alternate scenarios could give rise to the observed results. Caution is always needed in interpreting the data.

Scientists have increasingly warned of the need for caution now that DNA evidence has posed tough new questions for previous evolutionary assumptions. For example, mtDNA analysis of Neandertals suggests that we are not descended from them, contrary to previous assumptions (see the BBC news item of March 29, 2000, "Neanderthals Not Human Ancestors"; see also Krings et al., 1997; Gee, 2000; Ovchinnikov et al., 2000). But, some scientists warn, mtDNA analysis may not reflect the actual relationship between us and Neanderthals. Though I have no trouble discarding the Neanderthals as our ancestors, I agree that great caution must be used in drawing conclusions based on DNA analysis alone. Here, for example, is a cautionary statement from Adcock et al. (2001):

Different regions of the genome appear to have different evolutionary histories, and the idea that the pattern of human evolution can be deduced solely from the pattern of contemporary mitochondrial genome diversity is becoming increasingly untenable....

[mtDNA] results have been widely argued as evidence that Neandertals did not contribute genes to contemporary Europeans, thus supporting the recent out of Africa model. This interpretation may not be justified. mtDNA is a small component of the total genome, and the failure of a mitochondrial lineage to survive to the present does not imply a similar failure for the remainder of the genome. (emphasis mine)

In addition, there has been much recent publicity about errors in mtDNA databases, though these errors seem unlikely to change broad conclusions being drawn about the Americas. Carina Dennis reports news about these errors in the news story, "Error Reports Threaten to Unravel Databases of Mitochondrial DNA," Nature, Vol. 421, Feb. 20, 2003, pp. 773-774:
More than half of all published studies of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences contain mistakes, according to a geneticist at the University of Cambridge.

To the occasional chagrin of his peers, Peter Forster has repeatedly pointed out errors in published mtDNA sequences. . . . But his commentary in the latest issue of Annals of Human Genetics argues that the problem is far bigger than researchers had imagined.

The mistakes may be so extensive that geneticists could be drawing incorrect conclusions in the studies of human populations and evolution, says Forster.

However, some scientists question the impact of these errors, and suspect that only a small number of studies are seriously jeopardized by them.

I am finding that some of our critics get riled when I suggest that DNA studies have limitations that must be considered. I suppose that they are used to thinking that everything they see in their anti-Mormon videos is clearcut and known, as if genetic science had the same fundamentalist flavor that some critics seem to favor. For example, here is e-mail I received from a critic in 2004:

Sad, the day when anyone attempts to refute the integrity of DNA. Sadder still, at least in your case, when in the second paragraph of your response to DNA criticism you repeat several times ' . . .we don't know . . .". Anything religiously philosophical and as successful as the Mormon Church ought to be based on what is known rather than what is not.

The Drifter

My response:
Surely you realize that the foundation of science is a recognition of uncertainty - the fact that hypotheses can be disproven, but not absolutely proven, that conclusions must always bear a tint of the tentative. It is the hallmark of sound philosophical and scientific thought to recognize what is not yet known, and to add a heavy dose of "I don't know" to discussions of what we can infer or speculate based on current but forever limited and possibly errant data. Science generally does not promote fundamentalism, either scientific fundamentalism or religious. Those who wish to speak as if all were known and certain need to rethink their position.

Could Lehi's Genes Vanish Without a Trace? To the index at the top

Norse migrations to the Americas are instructive in dealing with the Book of Mormon, for they show that it is possible for major migrations to a new land to occur, persist for centuries, and then go into oblivion, much as happened for the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. The non-LDS scholar Dr. James Dixon makes several related points about the Norse in his 1993 book Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (pp. 130-132, as cited by Sorenson, pp. 8,9). He states that the Norse settlement in Vinland "demonstrates that various groups of humans could have attempted colonization of the American continents . . . only to subsequently disappear" while "evidence of their passing would be extremely difficult to detect in the archaeological record." Speaking of the extensive and long-lasting (about 500 years long) Norse settlement in Greenland, Dixon notes that Norse genes could have been mixed with native Greenland populations (Inuits or "Eskimos"), masking their European genetic ties. As a result, "the original Norse civilization of Greenland cannot be demonstrated ever to have happened based on genetic analysis of living people." That's an important lesson to keep in mind for those Book of Mormon critics who expect to see clear evidence of Semitic genes among American Indians from the Nephite colonists.

Suppose a couple boatloads of Hebrews from 600 B.C. landed in the Americas (Lehi's group and the people that came with Mulek at about the same time). Even if they represented a minute fraction of the human genetic matter on the continent, shouldn't we still see traces of Hebrew genes in Native Americans today?

There are simple but unlikely scenarios that could allow for Hebrew genes to be all over the continent, but not in the form of readily detectable mtDNA or Y chromosomes. For example, suppose none of Lehi's group had any daughters that survived in the New World, resulting in the next generation of men taking local women as wives. In one generation, all Hebrew mtDNA would have been lost, even though Lehi's descendants remained on the continent, still rich in Hebrew DNA. Such an effect could be achieved in several steps, rather than all at once, including the effects of war, disease, and so forth. The same could happen to the Y-chromosomes. But it's much more likely that some purely paternal or purely maternal lines remained intact, at least for many centuries. And they may be present today. But if the Hebraic immigrants to the Americas represented far less than 0.1% of the population of the New World, as they surely did, one would expect to find far less than 0.1% of modern Native Americans having Y chromosomes or mtDNA from Lehi's group. Now there may be some groups where Lehi's genes are more concentrated, and they may or may or may not have been measured yet. If they have been measured, would we know what to look for, not knowing the makeup of Lehi's or Sariah's genes? And if a single unusual outlier were found with remarkable resemblances to, say, modern Europeans, wouldn't it be rejected as a case of either obvious admixture or contamination of the sample?

Some ancient Native American genes have apparently gone extinct. mtDNA analysis of ancient Native American brains from Florida show genes that may have been lost from the Americas (Schurr et al., 1990, p. 619; see also Pääbo et al., 1988). Similar conclusions come from analysis of blood groups. Genes for the B and AB blood types have been largely lost in the Americas, but these genes were present in pre-Columbian humans in Peru. The blood groups found among modern Native Americans led A.E. Mourant (1983, p. 109) to state that:

the Amerinds appear to have possessed only the A and O genes before the coming of the Europeans. South of the USA-Mexican border only O appears to have been present. Most if not all the B genes in the northern zone and the A and B in the south can be accounted for by interbreeding with post-Columbian immigrant populations from across the Atlantic, but it is possible that some of the A and B genes in Andean populations are due to trans-Pacific immigration.
Actually, non-O genes were certainly in the Andes before Columbus, based on the study of ancient Peruvian mummies by M.J. Allison et al. (1978), who found all ABO blood group types (A, B, AB, and O) in mummies dating from 3000 B.C. to 1400 A.D., but in mummies dating after that period to 1650 A.D. only types A and O were found in their work. Clearly, some genes were lost in the Americas.

One obvious source for genetic loss was the massive eradication of Native Americans following the European Conquest, particularly due to widespread disease introduced by the Europeans. Scholars estimate that over 90% of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas were wiped out in the years following 1492. There is reason to believe that there was a loss in genetic diversity in the Americas due to "the 'bottleneck' introduced by the European colonization, which reduced the population to less than 5% of its original size" (Ribeiro-dos-Santos et al., 1997). For example, Ribeiro-dos-Santos (1996) examined mtDNA in ancient South American Amerindians and found that 39% of the samples were not in the four major mtDNA haplotypes that dominate modern Native Americans, and less than half of these other types could have been haplotype X (Ribeiro-dos-Santos et al., 1996 and 1997). They state that the evidence "permits us to suggest that, in addition to the postulated bottleneck effect during the migration from Asia to the Americas, the depopulation effect started by European colonization in the 16th century contributed to the reduction in genetic variability of Amerindians" (abstract, Ribeiro-dos-Santos et al., 1996). O'Rourke et al. (2000) also discuss the extinction of genes, noting that other authors have called the nineteenth century the "extinction period" for southern South America, and state that it "is not obvious that samples obtained from populations undergoing decimation and extinction would be representative of precontact groups. Indeed, reduced populated size during this period would be expected to be accompanied by reduced genetic variability" (p. 232).

This is a key issue: it appears that mtDNA haplotypes other than A, B, C, D, or X may have been selectively lost or greatly reduced in extent by the massive depopulation of Native Americans. Monsalve (1997) also discusses several other studies supporting the concept of other ancient haplotypes in the Americas. Thus, there is a possible disconnect between modern DNA studies of surviving populations and ancient Native Americans.

Finally, for both mtDNA and Y-chromosome analysis, we need to realize that the science of human origins is still in its infancy. Rather than having firmly settled the nature of ancient human migrations with DNA studies, science is just scratching the surface, leaving many questions unanswered. A perspective along these lines comes from Spencer Wells, Director of National Geographic's Genographic Project, in an interview from April 2005 with Wired News:

As we increase our sample size from Europe, for example, we might learn that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals as they moved into Europe around 35,000 years ago. There is no evidence at the moment but the current genetic sample size is very small. There are many unanswered questions: How many waves of migration into the Americas were there? Was there any migration across the Pacific to South America? Did Alexander the Great's armies leave a genetic trail as they moved through Central Asia? What populations in Africa gave rise to modern humans -- was it in East Africa or Southern Africa?
We will anxiously wait for further advances in understanding from DNA analysis.

The Success of DNA Analysis in Tracking Jewish Ancestry:
More Questions for the Book of Mormon To the index at the top

In spite of the points made above, the value of DNA analysis cannot be dismissed. In fact, we must recognize that DNA analysis has successfully linked people of Jewish descent, even when mixing with local populations is likely. This raises questions about the apparent absence of genetic markers for Hebraic descent that we might expect or hope to find occasionally among the DNA of modern Native Americans.

Torroni et al. (1993a) used RFLP analysis of Y-chromosomes to compare two Jewish groups, the Sephardim and Ashkenazim, with each other as well as Czechoslovaks and Lebanese. They found both groups of Jews to be similar to each other and quite different from the Czechoslovaks. But both Jewish groups were also closely related to Lebanese. Related conclusions came from Hammer et al. (2000), who found that a common pool of Y-chromosome haplotypes exist in Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations, and that Jewish communities show relatively little evidence of paternal admixture. Their abstract follows:

Haplotypes constructed from Y-chromosome markers were used to trace the paternal origins of the Jewish Diaspora. A set of 18 biallelic polymorphisms was genotyped in 1,371 males from 29 populations, including 7 Jewish (Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian) and 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. The Jewish populations were characterized by a diverse set of 13 haplotypes that were also present in non-Jewish populations from Africa, Asia, and Europe. A series of analyses was performed to address whether modern Jewish Y-chromosome diversity derives mainly from a common Middle Eastern source population or from admixture with neighboring non-Jewish populations during and after the Diaspora. Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level. Admixture estimates suggested low levels of European Y-chromosome gene flow into Ashkenazi and Roman Jewish communities. A multidimensional scaling plot placed six of the seven Jewish populations in a relatively tight cluster that was interspersed with Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations, including Palestinians and Syrians. Pairwise differentiation tests further indicated that these Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations were not statistically different. The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.
Thus, DNA analysis shows various groups of Jews having a common set of haplogroups for their Y-chromosomes--an indication of the power of DNA analysis. Interestingly, the pool of Jewish Y-chromosome haplogroups are not significantly different from non-Jewish Y-chromosomes. For the Book of Mormon, that might suggest that we should be looking for generic Middle Eastern/Mediterranean DNA as opposed to distinctively "Jewish DNA" (and remember that Lehi's DNA was not necessarily related to that of modern Jews or to that of members of the tribe of Judah in his day).

However, some Y-chromosomes in Jewish DNA, especially those associated with Jewish priests, do stand out and have proven useful in better understanding an enigmatic people in southern Africa, the Lemba tribe, who claim to be Jews. Their oral history claims that they are descended from Jewish men who fled to Africa in the 7th century B.C. Though they are black, they have practices that resemble some aspects of ancient Judaism. Y-chromosome analysis has proven to be a useful tool in validating the oral history of a black group called the Lemba, showing that a portion of the Lemba men do carry Y-chromosome markers found in Jews (Spurdle and Jenkins, 1996). Interestingly, (Spurdle and Jenkins (1996) found that a portion of the Lemba Y-chromosomes belonging to a haplotype called Ht18 possessed an allele that is not typical of Negroid groups but that has been found in Italians and Amerindians. Could this suggest another possibly Hebraic element for further study in Amerindians? (I'm just speculating.)

Thomas et al. (2000) found that a group of 12 polymorphisms forming the "Cohen modal haplotype" characteristic of Jewish priests (occurring about 50% of the time in priests, apparently, but only 12% of the time in lay Jews) was also found in some Lemba men. This haplotype was found in 8.8% of the Lemba men studied, strong indication of a Jewish ancestry. It must be noted that Thomas et al. report that significant differences in y-Chromosomes exist between the three main groups of Jewish males, the Cohanim (paternally inherited priesthood), the Leviim (non-Cohen members apparently of the priestly tribe of Levi), and Israelites (all non-Cohen and non-Levite Jews).

If traces of Jewish DNA could be found in the Lemba, why not in Native Americans, if the Book of Mormon is true?

As we'll see immediately below, several typical Jewish or Middle Eastern haplogroups are found in Native Americans, including two Y-chromosome haplogroups and, as discussed above, the mtDNA haplogroup X. Further evidence may be there, but can readily be overlooked, or may be obscured by the extensive intermingling of peoples that may have occurred in the New World. Still, we don't really know what genetic markers Lehi and his group had, so it's hard to know what to look for. Perhaps further analysis of Ht18, or the haplogroups X and H in the Americas will provide more answers.

One point to remember is that the long-term survival of founding haplotypes in small groups surrounded by other haplotypes requires specific types of marital behavior. If members of a population tend to marry within the group, mtDNA and Y-chromosomes from the group may be preserved. If the men regularly marry outsiders, mtDNA may be lost. If women in the group marry men from outside groups, Y-chromosomes can be lost. The apparent persistence of Jewish DNA markers in some Jewish groups is a reflection of historical marriage patterns, but these patterns do not necessarily hold for all ancient peoples with Hebrew roots. The Lemba lost their original Jewish mtDNA, but some Jewish Y-chromosomes survived. There may have been many isolated groups that lost both mtDNA and Y-Chromosome markers. The alleged lack of "Jewish DNA" in the Americas cannot rule out the possibility that Hebrew peoples came to one part of the Americas anciently.

There are other cases where DNA evidence apears to contradict posible information about different racial features among Native Americans. Certainly the wide variety of racial features preserved in ancient figurines from Native Americans and in the reports of early Spaniards suggest the presence of non-Asian genes in the ancient Americas. Another interesting though still speculative case involves the Inuit Indians (Eskimos). The news story, "DNA tests debunk blond Inuit legend," reports DNA results that provided no support for the idea of blond Nordic stock among the Inuits. Further background is provided in the story, "DNA Study To Settle Ancient Mystery About Mingling Of Inuit, Vikings." While it seems possible that Viking genes may have mingled with the Inuits, and it may be that early explorers who reported seeing some fair-skinned Inuits among the others were not lying, it is not necessarily surprising that typical DNA studies will find no trace of such genes today.

What is "Jewish DNA" anyway? Is It Really Absent in Native Americans? To the index at the top

Let's get back to the big question: is there Jewish or Hebrew DNA among Native Americans? First, what is Hebrew or Jewish DNA? Dr. Robert Pollack, a professor of biological sciences and director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University, makes the following important observation in his online article, "The Fallacy of Biological Judaism" (Pollack, 2003):
Unlike asking "Are Jews a family?", as historians have traditionally done, geneticists seeking to advise Ashkenazic families are also, in passing, asking, "Do Jews all share the same versions of one or more genes?" -- a question with a testable, precise answer. As no two people except pairs of identical twins have exactly the same version of the human genomic text, this claim could be confirmed or rejected by a search for versions of the human genome shared by all Jews and no other people.

Given the historical context of the Nazi "experiment," it is all the more remarkable that Jews all over the world have been flocking to the new technology of DNA-based diagnosis, eager to lend their individual genomes -- each a surviving data point from the terrible experiment in negative selection -- to a revisiting of this issue of biological Judaism.

At a recent meeting of the Association of Orthodox Jewish scientists and the Columbia Center for the Study of Science and Religion, it became clear that Jewish curiosity has provided sufficient genetic material to give a perfectly clear negative answer: There is no support in the genomes of today's Jews for the calumnious and calamitous model of biological Judaism. Though there are many deleterious versions of genes shared within the Ashkenazic community, there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew.

If there is no genetic marker that can identify a person as a Jew, I would ask Thomas Murphy and other critics of the Book of Mormon exactly what DNA evidence we should be looking for to test the hypothesis that a tiny handful of Hebrew people entered the Americas in 600 B.C.?

Murphy has said much about the Cohanim marker among the Jews. Yes, there is a Y-chromosome haplotype that is often found among the Cohanim line of the Jews. Dr. David Stewart (2003) quotes Dr. Ken Jacobs, an author of studies on Jewish genetics, as saying that:

The only Jewish subgroup that does show some homogeneity -- descendants of the Cohanim, or priestly class -- makes up only about 2 percent of the Jewish population. Even within the Cohanim, and certainly within the rest of the Jewish people, there's a vast amount of genetic variation that simply contradicts MacDonald's most basic assertion that Jewish genetic sameness is a sign that Judaism is an evolutionary group strategy.
The fact that there is some genetic homegeneity among one minute group of modern Jews derived from the tribe of Levi does not tell us what DNA markers we should expect if the Book of Mormon record is true. The Cohen Modal Haplotype is not expected to be among Lehi's group, and other Jewish groups don't show such persistent markers that allow Jews to be readily determined genetically. Remember the message of Dr. Robert Pollack (2003) quoted above: it is a fallacy to think of Jews as a biological group with distinct DNA.

Several studies have shown that the Jews do have several common genetic features, many of which are shared with other groups in the Middle East and Europe. Such studies include those of Bonne-Tamir et al. (1986), Spurdle and Jenkins (1996), Thomas (2000), Hammer et al. (1997), Skorecki et al. (1997), and Hammer et al. (2000). See also Elias (2000). These studies indicate that there is considerable variability among modern Jews and even among the narrower group of Jewish priests, where the priesthood is passed from father to son, along with Y chromosomes, though some genetic features are much more common among priests than among lay Jews (e.g., see Skorecki et al., 1997).

In the work of Hammer et al. (2000), their Table 1 lists Y-chromosome haplogroups (they use the term "haplotype") found in multiple Jewish populations and other Middle Easterners, as well as some Europeans and Africans. The haplogroups listed are 4S, 1R, Med, 1Ha, 1U, 1C, 1D, IL, and "Other." The Med haplogroup and haplogroup 4 are most common in Jewish populations. However, 1C was significant as well. In Hammer et al.'s sample of Near Eastern Jews, 1C was found in 31% of the subjects, compared to 28% for Med and 13% for 4S. 1C was rare in samples of Europeans and Africans.

Haplogroup 1C also exists in Asians--and in Native Americans, according to Karafet et al. (1999). Karafet's Table 1 shows that haplogroups 4 and 1C are found among Native Americans (1U was found only in an Eskimo), with 1C being so common that it is proposed as a major New World founder haplogroup. For example, it was the dominant haplogroup (found in at least half of the subjects) in Pima, Pueblos, and Cheyenne, and in 20% of the Zapotecs (3 of 15 reported). It is also found in almost half of Eskimos. It could certainly derive from Asia, where it is dominant among the Selkups and Kets of Siberia, and common in Siberian Eskimos. While an Asian origin is likely for at least some of the 1C and 1U haplotypes in the Americas, it does not rule out the possibility of "Jewish" DNA in the New World.

In fact, it's fair to ask what all the complaints of LDS critics are about. mtDNA studies show that haplogroup X is found in the Middle East and in some Native Americans, and based on empirically measured mutation rates, the timing of the entry of haplogroup X may be consistent with a the timing of Lehi's journey to the New World. Further, Y-chromosome studies show that two of the most common characteristic haplogroups for Jewish communities, 1C and 4, are also found in Native Americans, and the 1C is considered a founder haplogroup. The Eskimos probably got it from Asia, but couldn't the source in Zapotecs or other groups be from an ancient Jewish entry into the New World?

The fact is, "Jewish" DNA includes haplogroups found in the New World, and there are legitimate questions to be asked about the assumptions behind dating of DNA entry. Not only is it impossible to exclude the Book of Mormon based on the DNA evidence, evidence consistent with the Book of Mormon may be staring us in the face.

As we consider this evidence, it is critical that we avoid over-simplifying. There is no single "Jewish DNA" marker that all Jews share--there is a distribution of genes. Same for Native Americans. We don't expect ALL Jews and ALL Native Americans to have the same DNA--even if the primary settlers of the New World had been Jews. Rather, we would expect overlapping distributions of haplogroups--and that's what we see with haplogroups 1C and 4.

Not only do the Jews show a mix of haplogroups, but the mix in the New World--and the other anthropological evidence--suggest that the New World was an ancient melting pot that cannot be explained by just one or two migrations from Siberia.

Update: The complexity of "Jewish" DNA is further underscored by the recent work of Behar et al. (2003), who found an unexpected presence of possibly Central Asian DNA in some Levites. I briefly discuss their findings in my article, "Why Should We Expect to Find Jewish DNA in Native Americans?"

An Ancient Melting Pot To the index at the top

While some geneticists have argued that the DNA evidence points to only one or two migrations from Siberia, other evidence suggests that the New World has long been a genetic melting pot, filled with groups deriving from multiple sources. Multiple migrations may have occurred, including migrations by boat. This is indicated, for example, in Blake Edwards' article, "Who Was First? Untangling America's Ancient Roots," published in Discovery News, Oct. 21, 1999. Here is a quote:
"I just think it's going to be much more complex than we've thought in the past," says Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Dennis Stanford. He believes that early Americans arrived at different times, from different places, and by different means--on foot, in boats, maybe even by dogsled.
The views of Dr. Stanford from the Smithsonian Institution are further elaborated in the Academy Press Daily InScight on July 30, 2001, by Josh Gewolb, entitled "Skulls Suggest Two New World Migrations." This article refers to Stanford's controversial theory "that at least some immigrants may have come from Ice Age Europe."
"The environment in Europe was so harsh that land mammals were very rare," Stanford said, "so they went to the beach." If these ancient people had boats, it was natural that they should go to sea to look for food, and edging further north and west, they would eventually reach the fish-rich Grand Banks. "From there they move right down the east coast" of North America, he said.

Stanford bases his theory on the presence of Clovis-like artifacts on the Iberian Peninsula around 20,000 years ago, and that there are more Clovis points in the eastern United States than in the West.

Also, he notes that genetic evidence links eastern Native American populations with ancient Europeans, but not with Asians.

He suggests the migrants moved on Ice Age land bridges from Iberia to Wales and eventually to Ireland, then set sail to hunt the seals and fish on the rim of the polar ice pack. They edged further and further west, and when they reached North America "they probably didn't even know they were there."

Clovis refers to the prehistoric Native American culture with a characterstic style of arrowheads found near Clovis, New Mexico. There artifacts appear in the archaeological record around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Similar artifacts have been found across the US, Mexico and Central America. The Clovis people were long thought to be the first human inhabitants of the New World and the primary ancestors of all the ancient peoples of North and South America. But recently, a variety of finds predating the Clovis Culture have shown that there were others even earlier (Waters and Stafford, 2007).

Recent examination of ancient skulls also suggests more Old World contact than implied by DNA evidence alone. Karen Write's article, "First Americans" from the Feb. 1999 issue of Discover summarizes some of this research by Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and Doug Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.:

Owsley and Jantz have spent 20 years compiling a database of craniometric profiles of modern Native American tribes in the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Southwest regions of the United States. By comparing the dimensions of a given skull--some 90 measurements per skull--with these profiles, they can often tell which people the departed most resembles, whom, in effect, he is ancestor to.

But when Owsley and Jantz examined some of the oldest North American remains, the skulls didn't provide the kinship clues they expected. Measurements from Spirit Cave Man and two Minnesota skulls--one 7,900 and the other 8,700 years old--were off the charts. "We were impressed with how different the older skulls are from any of the modern-day groups," says Owsley. "They do not have the broad faces, they do not have the big, prominent cheekbones that you think of as the more traditional features of the Chinese and American Indians." Instead they looked more like the inhabitants of, say, Indonesia, or even Europe.

Owsley and Jantz weren't the first to notice this discrepancy. In the early 1990s anthropologists Gentry Steele of Texas A&M University and Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque had collected craniometric data from four North American skulls between 8,000 and 9,700 years old. They found the same puzzling differences between those subjects and modern Native Americans, the same puzzling affinities with southern Asians rather than northern Asians. A survey of prehistoric South Americans by anthropologist Walter Neves of the University of Sao Paolo yielded similar findings. Then Kennewick Man appeared in an eroded bank of the Columbia River. Based on his facial features, he was identified as a nineteenth-century European trapper until a CT scan revealed an ancient spearpoint embedded in his hip.

"I began to feel that what we were seeing was definitely not just sampling error," says Steele. And last year Neves reported that the oldest American, an 11,500-year-old skeleton from central Brazil, also shares the appearance of southern Asians and Australians.

But the fact is, most prehistoric Americans don't really look like anyone alive today, and they don't all look like each other, either. According to Owsley, Spirit Cave Man's closest match might be found among the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. But Kennewick Man has been likened to the ultra-Caucasoid British actor Patrick Stewart. And there are a couple of prehistoric Americans whose features actually do resemble those of modern Native Americans. One is Buhl Woman, a 10,700-year-old Idaho skeleton that was reburied in 1992. Another is 9,200-year-old Wizards Beach Man, whose remains were found in Nevada less than 100 miles to the northwest of Spirit Cave Man's rock-shelter. It seems that thousands of years before the arrival of Columbus, America was already something of a melting pot. (emphasis mine)

The analysis of pre-Columbian skulls from the Americas has now been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Jantz and Owsley, 2001). They performed detailed measurements on eleven archaic skulls from around the Americas, all believed to date from 2500 B.C. or earlier. Only one of the fossils showed "any particular affinity to recent Native Americans; their greatest similarities are with Europe, Polynesia, or East Asia. Several crania would be atypical in any recent population for which we have data. . . . They provide evidence for the presence of an early population that bears no similarity to the morphometric pattern of recent Indians or even to crania of comparable date in other regions of the continent." They also state that:
Recent analyses of North American (Steele and Powell, 1992, 1994; Powell and Rose, 1999) and South American crania (Neeves and Pucciarelli, 1991; Neves et al., 1996) consistently show that early American crania are differentiated from recent Native Americans, although these studies have not indicated the distinct nature of the Minnesota crania. Like Steele and Powell (1992), we could argue that there is a southern Pacific or European similarity to some of these crania. . . .

High variability among early American fossil crania may not by itself provide evidence of multiple migrations, but it is consistent with an emerging consensus that differentiated populations were involved in the early peopling of the North America. MtDNA evidence, often seen as supporting a single migration (e.g., Merriwether et al., 1995; Stone and Stoneking, 1998), may also be interpreted as supporting multiple migrations (Schurr et al., 1999); Schurr and Wallace, 1999). MtDNA haplogroup X, now recognized as one of the founding New World haplotypes, suggests ancient connections with Europe (Brown et al., 1998; Schurr and Wallace, 1999; Smith et al., 1999), as does lithic point technology (Stanford and Bradley, 2000).

The studies of ancient crania pointing to high genetic diversity and non-Asian features in ancient Native Americans corresponds with the diversity of ancient ceramic figurines of humans in Mesoamerica, showing that many non-Asian racial types were present before the Conquest. John L. Sorenson (1998, p. 18) states:
These ceramic figurines [shown on pages 18-22 of Sorenson, 1998] are mainly in private artifact collections in Mexico. The late Alexander von Wuthenau and other investigators have been struck with the variety of human types revealed by these objects and have drawn attention to this variety by photographic documentation [see especially Alexander von Wuthenau (1975) and Calderón (1977)]. They maintain that this is all the evidence needed to demonstrate that a wide variety of ethnic or racial types were present in Mexico and Central America.
This passage has a footnote given on page 228 of Sorenson:
Certain noted academic physical anthropologists concur. See, for instance, Eusebio Dávalos Hurtado, "El hombre en Mesoamerica hasta la llegada de los Españoles," Memorias y Revista de la Academica Nacional de Ciencias 49 (1964): 411, where that distinguished expert says that the "falsehood" of the claim of a single northeast Asian ancestry for American Indians has been exposed by the figurines shown in von Wuthenau's Unexpected Faces in Ancient America. Moreover, William W. Howells, a noted U.S. physical anthropologist, in "The Origins of American Indian Race Types," in The Maya and Their Neighbors, ed. Clarence L. Hay et al. (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 3-9, stated that there is probably greater variety among Amerindians "than there may be found in the White racial stock" (p. 5). An extensive literature on both sides of the question is summarized in John L. Sorenson and Martin Raish, Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas across the Oceans: An Annotated Bibliography, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Provo, Utah: Research Press, 1996).
Sorenson points to figurines with Semitic and Mediterranean features on page 20, for example. The evidence for pre-Columbian contact with Africans in ancient figurines is also hard to ignore, yet again is utterly inconsistent with the Siberia-only paradigm for Native American origins.

The findings of von Wuthenau have fascinated some non-Mormons who see possible evidence for ancient Hebrews in the Americas. One example is Hope of Israel Ministries, whose page, "The Saga of Ancient Hebrew Explorers: Who Really Discovered America?" argues that ancient Hebrews were in the Americas, possibly from Solomon's navies. The author actually interviewed von Wuthenau and made these comments:

Were Hebrews in the Americas long before Columbus? More evidence comes from the investigations of Dr. Alexander von Wuthenau, whom I interviewed at his home in Mexico City. His living room was filled to overflowing with terra cotta pottery figures and objects d' art. In his book The Art of Terra Cotta Pottery in Pre-Columbian Central and South America, Dr. Von Wuthenau published scores of photographs of these art objects. He tells of his astonishment, when he first noted that in the earliest, lower levels of each excavation he encountered -- not typical Indian heads -- but heads of Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, Tartars, Negroes, and "all kinds of white people, especially Semitic Types with and without beards" (p. 49).

At Acapulco, von Wuthenau found that early Semitic peoples lived in considerable numbers. "The curious points about these essentially primitive figures are that, first, there is an emphasis on markedly Semitic-Hebrew features," he declared (p. 86). Female figures found in the region are also markedly Caucasian, with delicate eyebrows, small mouths and opulent coiffures.

Cyrus Gordon, who has studied the collection, points out: "In the private collection of Alexander von Wuthenau is a Mayan head, larger than life-size, portraying a pensive, bearded Semite. The dolichosephalic ("long-headed") type fits the Near East well. He resembles certain European Jews, but he is more like many Yemenite Jews."

The cranial evidence for other racial types among the ancient Americans suggests that not all ancient genes have been thoroughly preserved among modern Native Americans, and that DNA testing may not be telling the full story of ancient genetic diversity. And the presence of many Semitic features in depictions of ancient peoples may provide evidence that Old World peoples, including Semites, were represented in the ancient Americas. The view that all ancient Native Americans came from Siberia simply does not agree with all the data and cannot be used to rule out other ancient migrations of European or Semitic peoples to the Americas.

Neel et al. (1994) found that many Amerindians are endemically infected with the human T-cell lymphotrophic virus type II (HTLV-II), which is also present in Mongolian but not Siberian natives. Neel et al. proposed that the first migrants to the New World were not from north or central Siberia but from Mongolia, Manchuria, or the extreme southeastern border of Siberia. Other Siberians would have come later.

Japanese Roots?

Though most genetic studies point toward Siberia as at least a dominant source of the Native Americans, new evidence also requires that Japanese genes be considered as well in the New World melting pot.

Below is an article from Reuters, Aug. 1, 2001 (see the online story at Discovery News):

Aug. 1--People closely resembling the prehistoric Jomon of Japan crossed a land bridge from Asia into the Americas as the last Ice Age waned 15,000 years ago to become the first human inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, according to a study published on Tuesday.

An international team of researchers led by C. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology said those people gave rise to the native inhabitants south of what is now the border between Canada and the United States.

The findings, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent the latest theory advanced by anthropologists as they seek to understand human origins in the New World. Other researchers argue that people arrived much earlier--perhaps more than 10,000 years earlier.

Analyzing 21 craniofacial measurements of prehistoric and recent samples of human skulls, the researchers said the earliest immigrants into the Americas showed no close association with any known mainland Asian population.

Instead, they showed close ties to the modern-day Ainu of Hokkaido and their Jomon predecessors in prehistoric Japan, and to the Polynesians of Oceania, according to the study.

Their route of entry in the New World was the Arctic land bridge connecting northern Asia to North America. The New World that they entered was a vastly different place from what it is now, with many large mammal species roaming around--including elephant cousins such as mammoths and mastodons--and saber-toothed cats on the prowl.

Those animals are now extinct, with other researchers blaming overkill by those early human hunters.

In contrast, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Na-Dene-speaking people who appeared in the American Southwest as recently as 1,000 years ago possess more craniofacial traits characteristic of Mongolian, Chinese and Southeast Asian populations, the researchers said.

For the analysis, Brace and colleagues compared a battery of measurements made on each skull to generate a "dendrogram," a tree-like figure in which the distance between the twigs reflects the closeness or distance between any given group of people and the others.

The researchers came from the University of Michigan, University of Wyoming, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, the Chengdu College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Sichuan province, and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar.

The possibility of a link between the Japanese and the Zuni tribe of Native Americans merits further attention as well. Significant evidence exists for ancient transoceanic contact with Japan. Their blood type and other genetic features make them surprisingly different from other Native Americans but similar to some Japanese, and a host of cultural traits show Japanese influence. A book on this topic is The Zuni Enigma by Nancy Yaw Davis (2000), who has a Ph.D. in anthropology. Also see a short article in Science Frontiers Online, No. 87: May-Jun 1993, as well as "Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts: The Present State of the Evidence" (Jett, 2002).

The DNA evidence has often been interpreted to mean from one to four ancient migrations occurred, but there are still genetic hints of more diversity that could be due to additional influxes or, as is more commonly assumed, a large amount of variation in the initial founding populations (Balliet et al., 1994; Santos et al., 1996). For example, according to Monsalve et al. (1994):

We found additional (mtDNA) diversity in South American aboriginals in three ways. First, an Asian-specific marker not previously reported in South American aboriginals was identified by a sequencing analysis in both the contemporary Andean and Amazonian aboriginal peoples. Second, two new haplotypes so far unique to South American aboriginals were found. Additionally, we show that South American aboriginals fall into discrete populations. These results suggest that the prehistoric colonization of South America is the outcome of multiple migrations; the data do not support a bottlenecking effect at the Isthmus of Panama.
While the Altaians may have the five most common haplogroups in the Americas, other Asian groups have been noted to be genetically close to some haplotypes found within those haplogroups. Torroni et al. (1992), for example, points out that one haplotype within mtDNA haplogroup A is common to some of the Maya, the Nadene, and the Taiwanese Han. Another haplotype in 7.4% of the Maya and 8.8% of the Nadene is one mutation away from haplotypes found in 7.7% of Koreans, 7.1% of Han Chinese and 5.0% of Taiwanese Han. One haplotype in haplogroup C is not found in the Nadene but was present in Amerindians (e.g., 14.8% of the Maya) and is also found among Japanese and Orientals.

2004 Update: Australian Origins, Too!
Here is a breaking news story about DNA and the Book of Mormon that I posted on my Mormanity blog on Sept. 11, 2004:

In the heated controversy about DNA and the Book of Mormon, critics have insisted that science has "proven" that the origins of ancient Americans were exclusively from northern Asia via the Bering Strait. Part of the typical LDS response has been to point out that a scientific understanding of the origin of ancient Americans is still in its infancy and far from complete. We have also pointed out that genes from ancient immigrant groups can vanish from the collective gene pool or be overlooked, and that some ancient groups may have come from other places even if the majority of ancient Americans came from Asia. The accuracy of such statements has just been underscored by news about an important discovery: a portion of ancient Americans may have come from Australia, southern Asia, and the Pacific rather than from northern Asia. This is reported in a BBC news story, "Tribe Challenges American Origins" by Paul Rincon on Sept. 7, 2004 (also see First Americans May Have Been Aussies from Reuters and Study: Native Americans Weren't the First from Discovery.com). This does not directly relate to Book of Mormon issues, but does underscore the inconclusive state of studies on ancient origins of the Americans, and shows how inaccurate our critics have been in their interpretation of science.

The article discusses evidence for the theory that some of the first inhabitants of this continent came "from Australia via Japan and Polynesia and down the Pacific coast of America." (Say, doesn't that imply boats were used?) A portion of these ancient Americans survived as the Pericues tribe of Baja California, but they died out in the 17th century.

If the claims about Australian origins for the earliest Americans are correct, it would seem that a significant source of genes in the ancient Americas has been missed by DNA analysis. Studies of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes among Native Americans and in remains of ancient Americans have highlighted Australia as a source of origin for ancient inhabitants. How could the Australian connection have been missed in previous studies? It could easily happen. The genes of a minority group may be spread all over a continent without any of the mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosome surviving. These two types of DNA are passed along purely maternal or paternal lines, and can easily be lost due to intermixing, even though other genes from the minority group persist. If you go back 10 generations in your own ancestry, your genealogy tree will have 1024 slots for all the ancestors who contributed to your genetic makeup, but your mitochondrial DNA came from only one woman out of that group, and your Y chromosome (if you are male) came from one man. Testing your mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosome only tells you something about 2 people out of 1024. The others have essentially "vanished" from the test results.

Stayed tuned: there is so much that we have yet to learn about the origins of ancient Americans. One thing is for sure: the fact that many modern Native Americans may have genes pointing to north Asian origins says nothing about the possibility of a man named Lehi bringing a small group of people to this continent around 600 B.C. Book of Mormon critics are making far too much out of the molehill they are dancing on.

HLA Genes: Possible Evidence for Transoceanic Migrations to the Americas To the index at the top

James L. Guthrie (2000/2001) examined extensive data for human lymphocyte antigens (HLAs) compiled by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) and others. Guthrie found evidence pointing to possible pre-Columbian migrations of peoples from Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere to the New World. Though "foreign" HLA genes represent a minority in the Americas, they may still provide important evidence for ancient contact between the hemispheres, in addition to the gene flow that occurred over the Bering Strait.

HLA genes are related to the human immune system and code for histocompatibility antigens on the surfaces of most cells. HLA type is used to match individuals for organ donation (e.g., bone marrow transplants). Unlike mtDNA and Y chromosomes, HLA genes are not passed on only along purely maternal or paternal lines, possibly making it easier for minority genes to persist. There are many varieties of HLAs, and most people have a number of different types in their body and a given population group may have a large set of HLA types represented (many groups have all 29 types of HLA identified by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994)). In contrast to most Old World groups, Native American groups show low levels of diversity in HLA types. This may be due to low population density, allowing some gene types from the original group to die out completely.

Of the HLA types found in Native Americans, 94% of the American type-A HLAs belong to four dominant varieties and 93% of the type-B HLAs belong to six dominant varieties. These ten varieties are termed "American" alleles by Guthrie. These ten alleles may represent early founding groups and may be consistent with Asian origins. However, the 18 "non-Indian" alleles--representing 6% of Native American type-A HLA and 7% of the type-B HLA--may point to other genetic sources. They were not discussed in any detail by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994), who were primarily interested in main effects. While Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) sought to exclude groups with significant Old World admixture, admixture remains a possible explanation for the "non-Indian" alleles. However, Guthrie argues that admixture cannot account for the observed genetic patterns in the "non-Indian" HLA genes:

Some anomalies may be explainable as recent admixtures, but I think that most are not. The apparently foreign HLA alleles are usually less characteristic of Spain, Portugal, or West Africa than of places alleged to have had earlier contact, such as Pacific Oceania, North Africa, or Southwest Asia, and in many instances "marker" genes of modern European and West African populations are absent. (p. 96)
While the HLA data discussed by Guthrie do not contradict the possibility that Native American genes overwhelmingly came from Asia, there are small amounts of genes that appear to provide evidence for the pre-Columbian entry of other groups in ways that I suggest are consistent with Book of Mormon claims. He states, for example, that:
Distribution of these ten HLAs in other parts of the world are not what would be expected from the premise that Americans stem mainly from Northeast Asians. Instead, the basic American populations seem most like those of western Asia and Southeast Asia, paralleling the findings of Steele and Powell (1992) regarding Paleo-Indian skulls. . . . I am struck by the fact that apparent patterns in HLA data seem to reflect hypothetical early interhemispheric contacts proposed independently by many others on the basis of other kinds of data, and I am skeptical that this result could be entirely accidental. (p. 115)
For example, the B*21 HLA allele found in the Americas appears to have Arabian or North African origins. Though generally praising Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) for their masterful work, Guthrie notes an inadequate treatment of the B*21 allele and the A*33 allele (p. 96):
The apparently Arabian or North African B*21 reaches frequencies of about 10% in three samples of Uto-Aztecan speakers, yet CS [Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994)] say only that it peaks in the Caucasian-occupied regions of Africa (p. 187), that it averages 1.5% in America with a "maximum above 10% in the extreme southwest of the United States" (p. 334), and that it is absent from South America (p. 369)--the last despite their data showing traces in the Mapuche, Araucano, and Yupa samples.

A*33 seems to trace movement of a Near-Eastern population to Southeast Asia and South America, but CS do not mention this. . . . Yet, the key to the synthetic maps summarizing the statistical treatment (p. 338) shows A*33 contributing 70-80% to the second principal component, with is strongest effect in eastern North America and Panama. Like B*21, A*33 is said to be absent in South America, despite a 5% level in the Quechua sample and a 3% level in the Aymara sample.

Guthrie later states that the B*21 allele is found in frequencies greater than 15% in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia (Tigre), and Jordan-Palestine, and that it has presence in four Uto-Aztecan populations, including a Central Amerind composite (p. 103). The B*21 allele is found at lower frequencies (5-6%) in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. One of the Uto-Aztecan groups, the Papago tribe, has the fourth-highest frequency of B*21 in the world (at least as measured so far), at 12.5%. Guthrie states that B*21, A*33, and also B*7 are the three most important "non-Indian" alleles, each contributing about 10% to the total frequency of atypical HLA. He writes (p. 116):
Their presence seems to reflect an early Near Eastern influence on the American west coast (A*33), European input to eastern Eskimos (B*7), and an Afro-Asiatic influence in southwestern North America (B*21). These interpretations are supported by findings of atypical genes from other systems, especially immunoglobin, transferrin, Kell, and Rhesus.
Other alleles may point to Mediterranean and European migrations. For example, the distribution of the A*32 allele suggests to Guthrie "a Mediterranean or specifically Aegean impact in the Caribbean region (including on the Cherokee) as well as on Tupians of the lower Amazon (Oyampi and Parakana). It seems to connect this set and the Central Amerind composite with northern Indian, Sardinia, the Tuareg of Algeria, and with populations around the Adriatic Sea in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy" (p. 104). He also notes that B*18 "appears to be an ancient Caucasoid antigen" that "suggests involvement of Mediterranean seafarers" (p. 106). It rises above a 1% level "only among the Nahua, Quechua, and eastern Maya" (p. 106).

The B*14 allele is said to link the western Mediterranean with the Quechua and other tribes. Since it is found in Spain, one might assume it came with the Spaniards to the New World. But if so, one might expect to find it throughout South America, but it is only found there in the Andes and in a Caingang sample near the Rio de la Plata. Guthrie states, "It seems likely to me that B*14 was carried to its present locations by a more ancient population, with roots in the Near East. It appears also in eastern Maya, Nahua, and Cherokee populations. . ." (p. 105).

Further, the A*1 antigen, said to be "typically European" by Cavalli-Sforza et al., is also found in Palestine and other places, and reaches significant levels in the Andes, but not elsewhere in South America--possibly indicative of ancient introduction and not part of the European genes introduced after Columbus. Guthrie suspects that its presence in the Andes is due to "an older, unrecognized contact with the Near East" (pp. 105-106). The B*18 allele also "appears to be an ancient Caucasoid antigen" that is found above the 1% level only among the Nahua, Quechua, and eastern Maya (p. 106).

This work remains tentative, but should show that anti-Mormon critics are simply wrong when they say that there is no genetic evidence consistent with the Book of Mormon. Taken in light of other evidence, such as that compiled by Jett (2002) in "Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts: The Present State of the Evidence," the idea of ancient contact between the Old World and the New has become entirely plausible.

If anything, the HLA evidence shows that different tools may give different results when it comes to deducing the origins of ancient Native Americans. Salzano (2002) surveys a wide variety of tools for tracking genetic origins (Y chromosomes, mtDNA, HLA, and others) and notes that they frequently do not agree. He concludes that:

1. The original homeland of the first Amerindians remains elusive, different results having been obtained using mtDNA, autosomal, sex-chromosome, or viral parasitic information.

2. Different waves of migration had been postulated on the basis of mtDNA, Y chromosome, and types of genetic and non-genetic (for instance, linguistic) evidences. The suggested dates of their occurrence are also variable.

Science is always tentative. Ties to Asia may be strong for Native Americans, but without knowing what Lehi's genes were, it's improper to allege that science has ruled out the existence of Nephites, or in any way decisively settled the origins of all Native Americans.

The Mathematics of Ancestry: Lehi as a Common Ancestor To the index at the top

Given the fact that there were other people in the hemisphere when Lehi came to the Americas, very few modern Native Americans will be directly descended from Lehi along an unbroken paternal line, or directly descended from Sariah along an unbroken maternal line, thus ensuring that very few Y chromosomes or very little mtDNA came from Lehi or Sariah, respectively. But on the other hand, if Lehi and Sariah were real people whose posterity did not all die out, then it is very likely that many modern Native Americans are their descendents. This conclusion is based on the mathematics of ancestry, as explained by genealogist Steve Olson in "The Royal We," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 289, No. 5, May 2002, pp. 62-64 (Olson 2002b). He discusses the recent realization, supported by extensive research, that "virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty"--a conclusion that initially seems surprising, but which
accords perfectly with research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations--two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents--but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors--a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past--only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.

Joseph Chang's work was published as "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," Advances in Applied Probability, 31: 1002-1026 (1999). An article by Kenneth Wachter (1980) anticipated some of Chang's results, according to Olson (2002a, p. 246).

A serious limitation in Chang's model is the assumption of random mating between Europeans, regardless of their birthplace. But based on actual genealogical data collected by Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist at Dublin City University, who has made use of the World Wide Web to bring together information from many people with European ancestry, the conclusion of Chang's model appear to be basically correct. Actual mating patterns will push back the date at which all those with any European ancestry will share a common ancestor. But there is a "constant churning" of people due to migrations, revolutions, wars, etc., which make the assumption of random mating more acceptable when Chang's model is applied over long periods of time. Thus, Olson contends (2002b):

This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty--even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.

Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors.

In his highly acclaimed book, Mapping Human History Olson (2002a, p. 114) also states:
The forces of genetic mixing are so powerful that everyone in the world has Jewish ancestors, though the amount of DNA from those ancestors in a given individual may be small. In fact, everyone on earth is by now a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and Aaron--if indeed they existed.
The work of Chang has been refined and strengthened in a new 2004 publication with Steve Olson and Douglas Rohde (Rohde et al., 2004). The improved model better considers some of the limitations to gene flow that were not in Chang's original model. The improved model points to a common ancestor for all humans only a few thousand years ago, rather than the widely mentioned figure of 200,000 years ago for "mitchondrial Eve." Of course, a purely maternal common ancestor is expected to take much longer than any common ancestor per se. But if we can expect to have a common ancestor of any kind dating back to, say, 3,000 years ago or so, then we are all more closely related than we have previously thought.

The implications of Chang's work and Rohde et al.'s work for Native Americans are clear: assuming the Book of Mormon to be true, then even if Lehi's group represented a tiny drop in a vast bucket of genetic matter in the Western hemisphere of their day, it is nevertheless very likely that the vast majority of Native Americans are genuine descendants of Lehi and his son, Laman, in spite of the details of pure paternal or maternal lines. So where is the DNA of Lehi in the Americas? It could be about everywhere--but not necessarily in Y chromosomes or mtDNA. So is it wrong to refer to Native Americans as "children of Lehi"? Absolutely not. Does this make all Native Americans "Lamanites" after all? It depends on the definition one uses--but if genetic descent from Laman is the criterion, then yes, it is possible that typical Native Americans are genetic "Lamanites," as well as some Anglos like myself (being one part in 512 Native American, thanks to a Mohawk woman in my ancestry).

Further, don't forget that the term "Lamanite" in the Book of Mormon is not necessarily a genetic term, and can simply describe those who aren't Nephites. (In fact, the Book of Mormon also says that the non-Hebrew Gentiles in the Americas who would beleve in Christ would be "numbered among the seed" of Lehi (1 Nephi 14:1-2)--presumably making them "children of Lehi" also, regardless of their DNA.) We must be careful about the genetic assumptions we import to the Book of Mormon text.

Squaring All the Evidence To the index at the top

DNA is not the only factor to consider in unraveling the history of this continent. In fact, for some purposes, it can give puzzling or even misleading results. Conclusions previously reported may prove to be incorrect upon further study.

Based on a misinterpretation of DNA data, a few critics are charging that the case for Hebrew contact with the ancient Americas has been utterly demolished. Some say that there is absolutely no evidence of ancient Old World migrations to the New World other than Asian migrations across the Bering Strait. Recognizable evidence may not have cropped up yet in DNA studies (again, such work is clearly still in its infancy, so arguments based on what hasn't been found must be treated with some caution). But there is abundant evidence for ancient transoceanic contact between the New and Old Worlds.

Dr. Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis University has been one of the most significant voices pointing to evidence for transoceanic contact, including evidence that ancient Semites came to America. His views were discussed recently in "Against the Tide: An Interview with Maverick Scholar Cyrus Gordon," Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2000. See also McCulloch (1993).

Interesting discussions of evidence for Old World contact, including Hebrew contact, with the Americas can be found in the following sources:

David H. Kelly has also found serious evidence of several pre-Columbian inscriptions of European origin: "We need to ask . . . where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World" (Kelly, 1990, p. 10). More evidence for scholarly acceptance of Old World scripts in the ancient Americas can be found in W.R. McGlone et al., Ancient American Inscriptions: Plow Marks or History? (Long Hill, Mass.: Early Sites Research Society, 1993, as cited by Sorenson, 1993, p. 21) and Jacques de Mahieu, "Corpus des inscriptions ruiniques d'Amerique du Sud," Kadath 68, Brussels, 1988, pp. 11-42 (cited by Sorenson, 1993, p. 21). More relevant research has tentatively identified hundreds of possible links between Uto-Aztecan languages (in Book of Mormon territory) with the ancient Hebrew language (work by Brian D. Stubbs, including "A Curious Element in Uto-Aztecan," The Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, Vol. 23, 1998 [according to second-hand sources; I have not yet read this article]; "Elements of Hebrew in Uto-Aztecan: A Summary of the Data," F.A.R.M.S. paper, 1988; "Looking Over vs. Overlooking Native American Languages: Let's Void the Void," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 1-49).

I've encountered a few noteworthy items in my own casual reading suggesting that some Mesoamerican elements show unusual correlations to cultures in other parts of the world. For example, while describing a scene a Palenque, Michael D. Coe, one of the most widely recognized experts on Mesoamerica, notes the similarity between a Mesoamerican practice and a Chinese practice involving the dead: "A large jade was held in each hand and another was placed in the mouth, a practice documented for the late Yucatec Maya, for the Aztec, and for the Chinese" (Michael D. Coe, The Maya, London: Thames and Hudson, 4th ed., 1987, pp. 108-109). Also at Palenque, Coe observes that the Temple of the Sun has two crossed spears, while two other temples have a branching world tree that "bears an astonishing resemblance to the Christian cross" with a quetzal bird above it (Coe. p. 108). The Funerary Crypt in one of the Palenque temples, where jade was abundantly used, was apparently built by a mighty ruler to house his remains in a manner very similar to Egyptian practice, with a "temple-pyramid" built above the crypt. "Thus it seems that the Temple of the Inscriptions was a funerary monument with exactly the same primary function as the Egyptian pyramids" (Coe, p. 109). This proves nothing on its own, but certainly raises the possibility of some relationship.

In fact, Michael Coe goes further in explicitly discussing the still controversial issue of transoceanic contact with the Old World (The Maya, op. cit., pp.45-46):

The possibility of some trans-Pacific influence on Mesoamerican cultures cannot, however, be so easily dismissed. Its most consistent proponent has been Professor David Kelley of the University of Calgary, who has long pointed out that within the twenty named days of the 260-day calendar so fundamental to Mesoamericans ... is a sequence of animals that can be matched in similar sequence to the lunar zodiacs of many East and Southeast-Asian civilizations. To Kelly, this resemblance is far too close to be merely coincidental. Furthermore, Asian and Mesoamerican cosmological systems, which emphasize a quadripartite universe of four cardinal points associated with specific colors, plants, animals, and even gods, are amazingly similar. Both Asian and Mesoamerican religions see a rabbit on the face of the full moon (whereas we see a "Man in the Moon"), and they also associate this luminary with a woman weaving at a loom.

Even more extraordinary, as the historian of science Dr. Joseph Needham reminds us, Chinese astronomers of the Han Dynasty as well as the ancient Maya used exactly the same complex calculations to give warning about the likelihood of lunar and solar eclipses. These data would suggest that there was direct contact across the Pacific. As oriental seafaring was always on a far higher plane than anything known in the prehispanic New World, it is possible that Asian intellectuals may have established some sort of contact with their Mesoamerican counterparts by the end of the Preclassic.

Lest this be thought to be idle speculation along the lines of the lunatic fringe books so common in the field, let me point out one further piece of evidence. Dr. Paul Tolstoy of the University of Montreal has made a meticulous study of the occurrence of the techniques and tools utilized in the manufacture of bark paper around the Pacific basin. It is his well-founded conclusion that this technology, known in ancient China, Southeast Asia and Indonesia, as well as in Mesoamerica, was diffused from eastern Indonesia to Mesoamerica at a very early date. The main use of such paper in Mesoamerica was in the production of screenfold books to record ritual, calendrical, and astronomical information. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it was through the medium of such books, which are still in use by Indonesian people like the Batak, that an intellectual exchange took place.

This by no means implies that the Maya--or any other Mesoamerican civilization--were merely derivative from Old World prototypes. What it does suggest is that at a few times in their history, the Maya may have been receptive to some important ideas originating in the Eastern Hemisphere.

I also encountered interesting evidence for ancient contact with Egypt while watching a fascinating documentary on the Discovery Channel called " Curse of the Cocaine Mummies," broadcast on Jan. 13, 1997 (9 p.m. Eastern time). Several years ago, Dr. Svetla Balabanova discovered cocaine and nicotine in ancient Egyptian mummies (a published source is S. Balabanova, F. Parsche, and W. Pirsig, "First Identification of Drugs in Egyptian Mummies," Natur Wissenschaften, Vol. 79, No. 8, 1992, p. 358 ff.). The scholarly community was disturbed with her findings, for it would suggest that the Egyptians had imported coca and tobacco from the New World. Since they "knew" that there was no ancient contact between the two continents, the chemical analysis of the mummies must be faulty, they assumed, or the samples must have been contaminated by substances from modern people. Additional controlled tests clearly established that the mummies really did have cocaine and tobacco in them that could not be explained by contamination (present inside hair shafts, present deep in the intestines, etc.). Much of the program featured various experts speculating on possible trade between Egypt and the Americas, with several stuffy experts denying the possibility of such contact since it contradicted what they were so sure they "knew." (So much for the scientific method!) In spite of clear evidence that the ancient Egyptians were using a product that comes only from the New World, several experts chose to laugh off the evidence on the basis of their paradigm of no ancient contact between the two continents. One expert said that the findings had to be discounted because we all know there is no evidence of ancient contact. In other words, evidence that does not fit the paradigm cannot be considered as evidence, ensuring that the dogmatic paradigm stays in place. (Kuhn's Science and Revolution is worth reading on this phenomenon, which I have witnessed many times in science.)

"Curse of the Cocaine Mummies" will be replayed periodically on the Discovery Channel. It's a well-done program, featuring comments from a number of scholars, including Dr. Alice Kehoe of Marquette University, discussing other evidence for transoceanic crossings, especially trans-Atlantic crossings, to the Americas before the time of Columbus. (Therefore, there are at least some serious scholars who would take issue with the sweeping claims of the Smithsonian Statement.) One interesting point made in the program is that the possibility of Viking journeys to the Americas was scoffed at by the experts until 1965, when an indisputable Norse site was found in Newfoundland. Now everyone accepts what was deemed ludicrous only a few years ago.

Not only was tobacco and cocaine from the Americas present in the Old World, but there is now evidence that maize ("corn") and sunflowers from the Americas were known in India prior to the time of Columbus, again suggestive of transoceanic contact. Dr. Carl L. Johannessen, emeritus professor of geography at the University of Oregon, recently prepared a paper entitled "Pre-Columbian American Sunflower and Maize Images in Indian Temples: Evidence of Contact Between Civilizations in India and America," printed in Mormons, Scripture, and the Ancient World, ed. Davis Bitton, Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1998, pp. 351-389. Some of the evidence for maize can be seen at the Archaeological Outliers site, but Dr. Johannessen's article is strongly recommended. He carefully explores many of the issues and questions relating to these finds. For example, he notes that sunflower seeds cannot float (not a viable explanation) and that transport by birds also fails as an explanation. He also carefully identifies many examples of these plants in Indian art to eliminate other possibilities. The bulk of the evidence is from Indian art, but some relevant findings from linguistics and DNA analysis are discussed as well. As a bonus, he discusses stone construction techniques which shows surprising parallels between ancient India and ancient Peru, suggestive of ancient cultural contact.

Not only was maize known in ancient India, but based on newly published evidence, it was known in ancient Libya as well. British archeologist David Mattingly found a late medieval [from about A.D. 1100 to 1492] "maize horizon" in a dig at an oasis in the Sahara desert, 700 miles south of Tripoli, Libya. The "maize horizon," indicative of the arrival of plants from the Americas (or, perhaps, from India?), was one of several botanical horizons from the people of that region who flourished agriculturally by exploiting underground water supplies in the area. The work is reported in David Mattingly, "Making the Desert Bloom: The Garamantian Capital and Its Underground Water System," Archaeology Odyssey, 3/2, March-April 2000, pp. 31-37, as cited in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2000, p. 69.

Transoceanic contact with Polynesians also has probably occurred, based on genetic evidence, in the opinion of Dr. Rebecca Cann at the University of Hawaii. A brief summary of the issue is presented in a FARMS news item, "Genetics Indicates That Polynesians Were Connected to Ancient America."

On a different note, Thomas Murphy has claimed that a linguistic analysis of Amerindian languages generally shows a link with Asia (DNA vs. The Book of Mormon videocassette from Licing Hope Ministries, Brigham City, Utah, 2003). As LDS linguist Brian Stubbs explains (Stubbs, 2003, p. 180), "That is 2 percent true and 98 percent false." Of over 100 language groups in the New World, one (Eskimo-Aleut) still spans the Bering Strait and another, the Na-Dene group, "shows promise for demonstrable language origins from Asia." But the vast majority of language families do not have any clear ties to Asia. many linguists assume they derived from Asian roots long ago, but that's an assumption.

Summary To the index at the top

DNA analysis has proven to be a useful tool, but one must understand that it has many limitations. Many inferences made from DNA studies about population origins or demographic events "are often not consistent among themselves or with available linguistic, archeological, and paleoanthropological data" (Tarazona-Santos, 2001). The disagreements over the number of migrations, the peoples of origin, the presence of much variation or little variation in the founding genes (e.g., Ward, et al. 1991 and Torroni et al., 1993c, p. 604) the differences between Y-chromosome and mtDNA results, the challenges with contamination, and the conflicts with linguistic and other evidence, all suggest that much work remains to be done to reliably obtain interpret DNA results.

It is clear that the origins of the Americas are more complicated than previously thought. This applies not only to scientists, but to those who accept the Book of Mormon. Just as scientific progress requires abandoning old errant assumption, increased knowledge about the Americas and improved understanding of the Book of Mormon text itself shows that many Latter-day Saints have incorrectly assumed that the Americas were a vacuum prior to Lehi's arrival, and that Lehi's group provided the primary genetic source for all Native Americas. These errant assumptions should be abandoned, but since the text does not make such claims, all we need abandon is our misunderstanding, not a sacred volume of scripture that is indeed an authentic ancient text.

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Other Recent News To the index at the top

Other Resources and Links To the index at the top

LDSFAQThe LDS FAQ Index

A Brief Review of Murphy and Southerton's "Galileo Event"--Kevin Barney responds to an article by Thomas Murphy and Simon Southerton, "Genetic Research a 'Galileo Event' for Mormons," Anthropology News, Vol. 44, No. 2 (February 2003): 20, a publication of the American Anthropological Association. Kevin's response is at FAIRLDS.org.

"Simon Says, But That Doesn't Make It So" - Blake Ostler's insightful response to Simon Southerton, published in Sunstone Magazine. The link is to a PDF document in which Ostler's response begins at page 4. Interestingly, Ostler shows that Southerton actually agrees with the primary response of LDS scientists on the DNA issue: the introduction of a small group of people into a populated hemisphere 2600 years ago is unlikely to have left a DNA fingerprint that we can readily detect today. The problem is that Southerton isn't attacking what the Book of Mormon actually says, but a popular way of interpreting of the Book of Mormon. He also provides valulable insights on the issue of intermarriage with local natives.

DNA and the Book of Mormon--Cooper Johnson's excellent article at FAIRLDS.org.

General questions about alleged problems in the Book of Mormon

My Book of Mormon Evidences Page

Intro to the Book of Mormon

Introduction to the LDS Church

FARMS Review of Books--great reviews of and responses to books about LDS scripture. Also see the FARMS news item from 2000, "Genetics Indicates That Polynesians Were Connected to Ancient America."

My LDS Links

DNA Mutation Rates & Evolution--an outstanding and carefully documented article on DNA mutation rates and the problem of using DNA as a molecular clock, written by Dr. Sean Pitman, Aug. 2003.

"The Problematic Role of DNA Testing in Unraveling Human History," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2000): 66-74. This article discusses the limitations and benefits of DNA analysis, urging caution before leaping to errant conclusions based on early work with new methods.

"How African Are You? What Genealogical Testing Can't Tell You. - article at Slate.com by John Hawks reminding us of the limitations of DNA testing.

Genetic Markers Are Not a Valid Test of Native Identity by Brett Lee Shelton, J.D. and Jonathan Marks, Ph.D.. This essay points out the serious limitations of DNA testing in identifying tribal identity. I would suggest that some of the same factors that limit DNA tests to determine one's status as a Native American would also limit DNA tests in determining whether someone is Jewish or not. And it also points out that 5% of Native Americans believed to not have non-native DNA fall outside the major haplotypes (e.g., mtDNA haplotypes A, B, C, D, and X).

New evidence from the Baja peninsula - an article from Discovery.com about an important source of ancient Americans other than northern Asia - a fact that has been entirely missed in the supposedly "Asia only" DNA studies.

DNA and the Book of Mormon by David Stewart, M.D. - a new resource with excellent information on this complex topic.

Tempest in a Tea Pot: DNA Studies and the Book of Mormon - Brant Gardner's article at FAIRLDS.org discusses of some of Tom Murphy's errors in interpreting scientific data.

A Brief History of the Limited Geographic View of the Book of Mormon by John Tvedtnes.

Joseph Smith and John Lloyd Stephens by Ted Dee Stoddard, a terrific article which shows the impact that a Mesoamerican explorer had on Joseph Smith's understanding of the Book of Mormon and its geography

Away from the Heartland: Joseph Smith, John Lloyd Stephens, and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon - post on my blog, Mormanity.

Mike Parker's LDS Library

Russell Anderson's Response Page--responds to many attacks of anti-Mormon critics.

SHIELDS--dealing with LDS historical and intellectual issues, including good answers to some common anti-Mormon questions.

DCP's Gospel Research InfoNet

FAIR--The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, dedicated to providing an intelligent defense of the truth. Many serious and well written papers can be accessed at their site.

Mike Ash's Mormon Fortress--a rich site loaded with great material.

Wade Englund's Apologetics an excellent resource for dealing with common tactics used by anti-Mormons.

A Social History of the Early Nephites by Brant Gardner, available at FARILDS.org.

The Nephi Project--strong evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon from the Arabian Peninsula, documented in videos.

Stone Age Columbus--An interesting BBC report about the possibility of ancient Europeans travelling by boat to the Americas in the Stone Age. Suggests that the origins of the Americas may be more diverse than conventional thinking would allow.

LDS FAQ: Questions about Science and Mormon Doctrine - a 2004 essay by Jeff Lindsay that deals with general issues of science and Mormonism, as well as specifics such as evolution, the Flood, etc.

The Waters of the Flood by Hugh Ross, Ph.D. Dr. Ross, a faithful non-LDS Christian and a scientist, points out that scriptural language about the flood covering "all the earth" need not refer to the entire globe, and argues for a scope limited to Mesopotamia. While LDS writers and leaders have traditionally taken scriptural language about the flood at a purely literal level, a limited flood paradigm is much more easily reconciled with modern science.

DNA-related articles in the November 2003 issue of The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies:

Also see Hugh Hewitt Interviews Two LDS Scholars on the DNA and Book of Mormon Issue (Feb. 2006) - the transcript of an interesting radio interview with Dr. Daniel Peterson of BYU and Dr. John Butler, a project leader at the Human Identity DNA Technologies Group, Biotechnology Division for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Finally, don't overlook the most basic resource on this topic, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. It is available online at lds.org, or you can obtain a free copy at www.mormon.org or by calling 1-800-332-5588. After withstanding more than 170 years of hostile attacks, it is truer than ever, and vitally relevant for our day. Yes, the Book of Mormon is an authentic ancient record, a true book, and the word of God. But don't take my word for it: study it yourself, ponder it, apply any tests you like, and seek guidance from God to know for yourself if it is true.

Curator: Jeff Lindsay ,  Contact:
Creation Date: Aug. 27, 2001
Last Updated: Jan. 10, 2010
URL: "http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/DNA.shtml"