DNA on the apologists' chart

The genetics of Native American origins, and why the apologists' anachronism chart carries no DNA item at all.

What the Church claims

The Lamanites are ancestors (until 2006, 'the principal ancestors') of the American Indians.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. As the Church taught it until 2006, principal ancestry, the claim is dead: Native American genomes are overwhelmingly Asian in origin with no Israelite component found. What survives is the much smaller claim of a tiny group absorbed without trace, which genetics cannot exclude and cannot support either. Weak rather than untenable for that reason alone.

The record

  • The Church's essay concedes that the majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA.
  • Ancient-genome studies (Reich 2012; Moreno-Mayar 2018; Posth 2018) derive all sampled ancient and modern Indigenous Americans from an East Asian lineage plus Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, isolated before about 20,000 years ago; haplogroup X2a probably shares that Siberian origin.
  • Murphy (2003): of 496 Central American mtDNA sequences, 99.2% fall in lineages A-D and the remainder in X with Siberian-type markers.
  • The introduction to the Book of Mormon was changed in 2006 from 'principal ancestors' to 'among the ancestors'.
  • Roper's anachronism chart contains no DNA item.

The moving target

  • 1981: Lamanites 'are the principal ancestors of the American Indians'.
  • 2006: Changed to 'are among the ancestors'.
  • 2014: DNA cannot confirm or refute the book; founder effect, drift and bottlenecks may have erased a small Near Eastern signal.

The exchange

Gospel Topics essay (drawing on Ugo Perego and others)

A small colony entering a large existing population would leave no detectable signal; we do not know what Lehi's DNA looked like.

The answer: As population genetics this is possible for uniparental markers. But it rescues the book by abandoning what the text, Joseph Smith and a century and a half of prophets taught: an empty promised land and Indians as Lehi's children. Genome-wide data now detect admixture of a percent or less (e.g. Polynesian-American contact), and none of Near Eastern type predates 1492. Murphy notes the required chance loss must occur independently for the Jaredites, Lehites and Mulekites.

What they get right: The essay is scientifically literate, and skeptics overreach when they say DNA 'disproves' a small-colony model; it removes the evidence for it and contradicts the traditional one.

The chart's compilers; FAIR

The chart carries no DNA item because DNA is not an anachronism. An anachronism is an object in the wrong period; a genetic absence is a different kind of claim and belongs on a different list.

The answer: The distinction is convenient rather than principled, because the chart scores absences throughout. Horses, steel, wheat and silk are all items whose complaint is that the thing is missing from the record, and each is retired as confirmed the moment one arguable instance turns up. DNA is the single absence where the evidence has moved decisively against the book since 1830 and keeps moving, which is precisely what the chart's trend argument says should never happen. Leaving it off is not taxonomy, it is the selection effect the percentage depends on.

What they get right: The genetic point in the Gospel Topics essay is sound on its own terms: a small founding lineage really can vanish from a modern gene pool, and no careful geneticist says otherwise.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

DNA eliminated the hemispheric reading that was official teaching until the 2000s, as the 2006 wording change tacitly admits. The surviving limited-geography reading is compatible with the genetics only because it predicts nothing detectable.

The apologetic case

The text never says the land was empty, and careful LDS readers proposed 'others' before DNA. Small founding groups do vanish genetically; absence of a signal is what the limited model predicts.

What would change this

Pre-Columbian genomes from the Americas carrying Levantine ancestry dated to the first millennium BC.

Closely related

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.