Simon Southerton debunks latest LDS apologetic “discovery” on horses

[Manetho]

In order for the Book of Mormon to be accurate, besides the horses you need:

Tanners and saddlers
Blacksmiths
Iron for the blacksmiths
Iron ore to make the iron
Iron foundries
Granaries to store the horse food
Vast grain fields to grow the grain
Harvesting implements and infrastructure
Maybe even glue factories

And on and on.

Exactly. Every society has a sort of "toolkit" of plants and animals it makes use of, and techniques and systems for making use of them. The Near Eastern Iron Age civilizational toolkit is very well-known: wheat, horses, cattle, sheep, and iron smelting. They are so familiar to our Eurasian-descended society that historians have been very slow to realize just how sophisticated the societies of the precolumbian Americas could become without any of those things, using entirely different toolkits. (For more on that subject, every American should read 1491 by Charles C. Mann.) The archaeological traces left behind by the Near Eastern Iron Age toolkit are very recognizable, and yet they don't show up anywhere in the precolumbian Americas. One set of horse bones, even if genuine, wouldn't solve that problem.

[Physics Guy]

Presumably the limited geography school of Book of Mormon interpretation would be happy to assume that the Nephite civilization stayed small and isolated, and then collapsed back into the Stone Age before merging into the older Native American populations. They would just say that the breeding and use of horses was lost along with ironworking. If any horses survived the extinction of the Nephites, they just went wild and then went extinct as wild horses had long before in the rest of the Americas.

I can't think of any precedent for an Iron Age civilization collapsing back into the Stone Age, but this problem with the Book of Mormon doesn't seem to be new. Even in 1830 it must have been all but universally known that Native American technology at the time of European contact was Stone Age, and so it must have been obvious that the Book of Mormon implied that Iron Age technology was somehow forgotten by the Lamanites. And many early Mormons must have known that Europeans never just lost iron or horses and went back to hunting with stone-tipped weapons on foot. So it shouldn't be news that the Book of Mormon implies a uniquely catastrophic technological collapse for the Lamanites.

Perhaps most early Mormons were ignorant enough of the rest of the world's history to suppose that technology loss had been a common pattern in Asia or Africa or something. At any rate Mormons seem to have been prepared all along to accept that their Lamanites lost a lot of technology, implausible as that is, because it was part of some kind of divine punishment or something. I don't think that modern archaeology has really made that technological collapse any more implausible than it should already have been in 1830.

[huckelberry]

I find myself with a bit of curiosity about this discovery. It does not cross over to support for the Book of Mormon. There are many considerations including Physics Guys comments doubting the idea of cultural degeneration. Even if there was a surviving group of horses that is little support for the Book of Mormon. Further there are a number of consideration indicating the study is itself a long way from conclusive. I am curious about the science.

Layers of charcoal carbon dated is to my understanding often used to date destruction events in archeology. I thought some standardization estimates of rainwater contamination of carbon are in use. Mr Southerton points out high amounts of Carbonates in the soil made the problem more extremes in this study of horse remains. I understand that to refer to Calcium carbonate which might trade some ions brought in by the rain. Does that effect the charcoal? Ok some calcium would be in the charcoal. Is this problem not there in any study of charcoal for dating?