A Very Limited Geography
Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 3:25 am
In the last few weeks I have heard apologists and relatives of mine summarily dismiss the DNA-Book of Mormon issue. Oh that problem was solved years ago. Get over it.
Why me (Mormon Discussions)
“My gosh, I forgot about Simon. I remember his rise to antimormon king. Everywhere on the antimormon circuit he was being lauded. His DNA article had antimormons cheering and doing hand stands. The postmormons were going ape crap over him.
But...then he faded from view and his DNA theory fell flat.”
Relative
“I thought that after the D&A (sic) thing had been proved wrong you would have stopped criticizing the Church so publicly”.
At the risk (well certainty) of being accused of leaving the church but not being able to leave it alone, here's a little update.
Since church approved (but unofficial) apologists now virtually all sing to the Limited Geography song sheet, I thought I would see what the DNA situation currently looks like in Mesoamerica. Some excellent papers have been published in the last couple of years that have focussed on this region.
The mitochondrial (maternal) DNA lineages have now been published for 1,164 native Mesoamericans from 30 populations ranging from Central Mexico down to Cost Rica. About 99.6% of their maternal lineages belong to the four major lineages (A, B, C or D) which are derived from Asia. Only eleven Mesoamericans possessed a mtDNA lineage that didn’t originate in Asia. Of the eleven non-Asian lineages, three were African L lineages, and three were not fully characterised.
The remaining five lineages included two H lineages, one U, one J and one T lineage. These lineages are found in European populations in the following frequencies: lineage H (54%), lineage U (16%), lineage J (10%) and lineage T (8%). By comparing these 5 lineages to the thousands of mtDNA sequences in global databases, exact matches were found for the U and T lineages among individuals from Western Europe, namely Spain, Portugal and Poland. Meanwhile, the most abundant female lineages in Middle Eastern populations are lineage K (32%) followed by lineage H (26%). Given that African lineages were detected and the exact matches with Portuguese lineages, it looks very likely that these “other” lineages originated from post Columbus admixture with African and European colonists. Similar levels of admixture have been observed in several other Native American populations, particularly in eastern North America, which was impacted more heavily after first contact.
Scientists are also able to determine when this admixture occurred. That is, they can estimate approximately how many years ago the European or African DNA entered a Native American’s family tree. They do this using high throughput DNA technology to track the inheritance of nuclear DNA markers. The major population groups (Eurasians, American Indians, Africans) have thousands of unique nuclear DNA markers that allow detection of their nuclear DNA. This same technology was used to determine that most of us (Eurasians) have a small proportion of Neanderthal nuclear DNA in our genomes. The nuclear DNA of yet another ancient hominid, Denisovans, was recently found to be present in Melanesians.
Scientists recently used this approach to determine the time when European or African DNA entered the family trees of Mesoamericans. It was found to be in about the last 500 years. While the vast majority of the DNA of Mesoamerican Indians is derived from Asian ancestors, the remaining small proportion of non-Asian DNA appears to have entered their family trees since the arrival of Columbus. So even in Mesoamerica, the only reasonable location for the Book of Mormon lands, according to most apologists, the descendants of Book of Mormon groups continue to escape detection.
Yet apologists continue to pretend that the science fits perfectly with a “correct” or “serious” interpretation of the Book of Mormon.
“If we forego traditions and folk-assumptions about the Book of Mormon and apply the methods of modern science and scholarship to what the Book of Mormon actually says and does not say, we find that the book paints a picture which is amazingly similar in many ways to the same picture painted by New World experts about the ancient cultures during Book of Mormon times” (Michael Ash, Mormon Times 25 April 2011)
I don’t know what New World picture Ash is looking at.
Science has revealed that Mesoamerica was colonized about 15,000 years ago by people who had walked across Beringia from Siberia. By about 10,000 years ago these people had begun domesticating maize, beans, and other crops and had begun to establish large sedentary populations. By 600 BC any group arriving in the New World would have immediately encountered vast numbers of Native Americans, particularly in Mesoamerica where the earliest civilizations emerged. These were civilizations that arose completely independently of Old World civilizations.
I stand by what I said seven years ago.
“Ten centuries ago a handful of Norse sailors slipped into Newfoundland, established small colonies, traded with local natives, then sailed back into the fog of history. In spite of the small scale of their settlements and the brevity of their stay, unequivocal evidence of their presence has been found. Just six centuries earlier the Book of Mormon tells us, a climactic battle between fair-skinned Nephites and dark-skinned Lamanites ended a millennial dominion by a literate, Christian, Bronze Age civilization with a population numbering in the millions. Decades of serious and honest scholarship have failed to uncover credible evidence that these Book of Mormon civilizations ever existed. No Semitic languages, no Israelites speaking these languages, no swords or steel to make them. They remain a great civilization vanished without a trace, the people along with their genes” (Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church, 2004)
Why me (Mormon Discussions)
“My gosh, I forgot about Simon. I remember his rise to antimormon king. Everywhere on the antimormon circuit he was being lauded. His DNA article had antimormons cheering and doing hand stands. The postmormons were going ape crap over him.
But...then he faded from view and his DNA theory fell flat.”
Relative
“I thought that after the D&A (sic) thing had been proved wrong you would have stopped criticizing the Church so publicly”.
At the risk (well certainty) of being accused of leaving the church but not being able to leave it alone, here's a little update.
Since church approved (but unofficial) apologists now virtually all sing to the Limited Geography song sheet, I thought I would see what the DNA situation currently looks like in Mesoamerica. Some excellent papers have been published in the last couple of years that have focussed on this region.
The mitochondrial (maternal) DNA lineages have now been published for 1,164 native Mesoamericans from 30 populations ranging from Central Mexico down to Cost Rica. About 99.6% of their maternal lineages belong to the four major lineages (A, B, C or D) which are derived from Asia. Only eleven Mesoamericans possessed a mtDNA lineage that didn’t originate in Asia. Of the eleven non-Asian lineages, three were African L lineages, and three were not fully characterised.
The remaining five lineages included two H lineages, one U, one J and one T lineage. These lineages are found in European populations in the following frequencies: lineage H (54%), lineage U (16%), lineage J (10%) and lineage T (8%). By comparing these 5 lineages to the thousands of mtDNA sequences in global databases, exact matches were found for the U and T lineages among individuals from Western Europe, namely Spain, Portugal and Poland. Meanwhile, the most abundant female lineages in Middle Eastern populations are lineage K (32%) followed by lineage H (26%). Given that African lineages were detected and the exact matches with Portuguese lineages, it looks very likely that these “other” lineages originated from post Columbus admixture with African and European colonists. Similar levels of admixture have been observed in several other Native American populations, particularly in eastern North America, which was impacted more heavily after first contact.
Scientists are also able to determine when this admixture occurred. That is, they can estimate approximately how many years ago the European or African DNA entered a Native American’s family tree. They do this using high throughput DNA technology to track the inheritance of nuclear DNA markers. The major population groups (Eurasians, American Indians, Africans) have thousands of unique nuclear DNA markers that allow detection of their nuclear DNA. This same technology was used to determine that most of us (Eurasians) have a small proportion of Neanderthal nuclear DNA in our genomes. The nuclear DNA of yet another ancient hominid, Denisovans, was recently found to be present in Melanesians.
Scientists recently used this approach to determine the time when European or African DNA entered the family trees of Mesoamericans. It was found to be in about the last 500 years. While the vast majority of the DNA of Mesoamerican Indians is derived from Asian ancestors, the remaining small proportion of non-Asian DNA appears to have entered their family trees since the arrival of Columbus. So even in Mesoamerica, the only reasonable location for the Book of Mormon lands, according to most apologists, the descendants of Book of Mormon groups continue to escape detection.
Yet apologists continue to pretend that the science fits perfectly with a “correct” or “serious” interpretation of the Book of Mormon.
“If we forego traditions and folk-assumptions about the Book of Mormon and apply the methods of modern science and scholarship to what the Book of Mormon actually says and does not say, we find that the book paints a picture which is amazingly similar in many ways to the same picture painted by New World experts about the ancient cultures during Book of Mormon times” (Michael Ash, Mormon Times 25 April 2011)
I don’t know what New World picture Ash is looking at.
Science has revealed that Mesoamerica was colonized about 15,000 years ago by people who had walked across Beringia from Siberia. By about 10,000 years ago these people had begun domesticating maize, beans, and other crops and had begun to establish large sedentary populations. By 600 BC any group arriving in the New World would have immediately encountered vast numbers of Native Americans, particularly in Mesoamerica where the earliest civilizations emerged. These were civilizations that arose completely independently of Old World civilizations.
I stand by what I said seven years ago.
“Ten centuries ago a handful of Norse sailors slipped into Newfoundland, established small colonies, traded with local natives, then sailed back into the fog of history. In spite of the small scale of their settlements and the brevity of their stay, unequivocal evidence of their presence has been found. Just six centuries earlier the Book of Mormon tells us, a climactic battle between fair-skinned Nephites and dark-skinned Lamanites ended a millennial dominion by a literate, Christian, Bronze Age civilization with a population numbering in the millions. Decades of serious and honest scholarship have failed to uncover credible evidence that these Book of Mormon civilizations ever existed. No Semitic languages, no Israelites speaking these languages, no swords or steel to make them. They remain a great civilization vanished without a trace, the people along with their genes” (Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church, 2004)