They found the White Lamanites

[_squawkeye]

Blond Eskimos or White Eskimos is the popular name for a group of Eskimos residing on both sides of Coronation Gulf between mainland Canada and Victoria Island, whose first contact with Westerners may go back to Sir John Franklin in 1821 and Dease and Simpson in 1838-9. They were visited and described by the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1910. A frequent occurrence of light hair and gray or blue eyes exists amongst them, while most other New World peoples have dark hair and brown eyes. In his book My Life with the Eskimos, Stefánsson proposed several explanations:



Early mixture with Norse colonists from Greenland;
Mixture with European whalers;
Ancient migration of European-like people from across the Bering Strait;


He rejected the second explanation because "if the mixing of races
is so recent, it would appear that it should be most conspicuous
farther east where the whalers had their headquarters, fading away as
one goes westward. The opposite is the case".



In 2003, two Icelandic scientists, the geneticist and anthropologists Agnar Helgason and Gisli Palsson announced the results of their research comparing DNA from 100 Cambridge Bay Inuit with DNA from Icelanders, and concluded that there was no match.[1]

[_Sethbag]

It's also possible that this could be simply due to mutations in the genes responsible for producing the pigments that color hair and irises. Any color other than brown, for eyes, is the result in reduced production of eumelanin in the iris. So any mutation that reduced the production of this pigment could result in gray, green, or blue eyes. The story is similar with blond hair.

I'm not saying this is what happened, only that it must be considered as a possibility. After all, it was the result of mutations in the first place that led to anyone at all having blond hair or blue eyes, and it's not like mutations stopping happening.

[_John Larsen]

Why in the world would you think that Jewish descendants would be blond?

[_Sethbag]

Yes, of course that's the real killer question with respect to the "white lamanites" specifically. My comments were addressed more generically, as in how blond hair or blue eyes could have found themselves amongst the eskimos, regardless of whether these were in any way related to the Mormon mythological figure of Lehi.

But you're absolutely right - there's no reason to think that Lehites would actually have blond hair and blues eyes, so even the theoretical connection to LDS mythology is seriously in jeopardy.


*********************** and now for something completely (ok, partially) different **********


My own answer to the riddle is the best, though: some Eskimos got lost and found the entrance to the secret tunnels going down to the underground Arctic lair of the Lost Ten Tribes. They ended up having sex with some of the Israelites down under (not in Oz though) and when children were born to these pairings, the Israelites heeded the ancient scriptural mandate not to mix their bloodline with the foreigners, and expelled the children. The children then went back to their ancestral eskimo tribes and joined them, and that's why there are blond haired and blue eyed eskimos.

The reason the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel had blond hair and blue eyes is that Mormons tend to have a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed people who came over from England and Scandinavia in the early days of the church, and as we know the Mormons represent God's true people on Earth, so of course the Israelites looked just like them, you know? Just like Jesus H. Christ the white guy. Because, you know, people invent their gods in their own image.

[_moksha]

I think that some college sorority babes were tricked into stepping through a time portal at the engineering building of the University of British Columbia on March 2, 2068. The pranksters from the physics lab were never apprehended.

[_squawkeye]

I have personally heard at least four testimonies in the meeting by people who testify they have seen Jesus and he has blond hair and blue eyes. They testify in Church so it must be true.

[_John Larsen]

There are other Asiatic people who have recessive blond hair. Some Mongolians, Chinese and even Hmong people in South East Asia show this trait. So that fact that it shows up in the Americas is consistent with the theories of Asiatic migration.