DNA and Native American origins

Whether the people the Book of Mormon calls Lamanites left any trace in the genomes of the Native Americans the Church long said were their descendants.

What the Church claims

The Book of Mormon is a record of Israelites who sailed to the Americas about 600 BC; from 1981 to 2006 its official introduction said their Lamanite descendants 'are the principal ancestors of the American Indians'.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The principal-ancestry claim the Church printed until 2006 is dead: the genomes are overwhelmingly Asian, and no Israelite component has been found. The claim survives only in the reduced form adopted afterwards, a small colony absorbed without trace, which genetics can neither exclude nor support. Weak rather than untenable for that reason alone.

The record

  • The Church's own essay concedes that 'the majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA' and that scientists trace them to migration from northeast Asia.
  • Population genetics places the founding of Native American populations in a small group of Asian founders who paused in Beringia before spreading south; no Near Eastern founding lineage has been identified.
  • The 1981 introduction called the Lamanites 'the principal ancestors of the American Indians'. The October 2006 Doubleday second edition, at the Church's request, changed this to 'among the ancestors'; the Church's current edition reads the same way.
  • Church spokesman Mark Tuttle said in November 2007 that the change 'takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known'.
  • Genome-wide studies (Reich et al. 2012; Raghavan et al. 2014; Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018; Posth et al. 2018) model Native Americans as a single founding population mixing Ancient East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, isolated by about 22,000 years ago and entering the continent about 16,000 years ago. The Ancient North Eurasian component is a Palaeolithic Siberian lineage, not a Bronze or Iron Age Near Eastern one.
  • Thomas Murphy (2002, 2003) and Simon Southerton (2004) brought the genetic argument to an LDS audience; the Church's first response, on 2003-11-11, called DNA-based attacks 'ill considered'.
  • Haplogroup X2a, which the Heartland movement presents as Israelite DNA, is absent from the Middle East, has a coalescence date of roughly 14,200-17,000 years ago, and was carried by Kennewick Man about 8,500 years ago; Raff and Bolnick (2015) name and reject Rod Meldrum's 2009 claim.

The moving target

  • 1981: Lamanites 'are the principal ancestors of the American Indians'.
  • 1993: The book 'only purports to be an account of a few peoples who inhabited a portion of the Americas'.
  • 2003-11-11: DNA-based attacks on the Book of Mormon are 'ill considered'.
  • 2006-10: Lamanites 'are among the ancestors of the American Indians'.
  • 2014-01: Most Native American DNA is Asian; founder effect, drift and the post-1492 bottleneck mean Lehi's DNA may be undetectable; DNA 'cannot be used decisively to either affirm or reject' the book.

The exchange

Gospel Topics essay; Ugo Perego; Michael Whiting; Scripture Central KnoWhy

Lehi's party was a tiny group entering a large existing population. Nobody knows what Lehi's DNA looked like; founder effect, genetic drift and the roughly 90 percent post-contact population collapse would have erased or hidden his markers; and mtDNA/Y-chromosome tests sample only a sliver of ancestry.

The answer: As population genetics the argument is sound: a few dozen migrants absorbed into millions could vanish from uniparental markers. But it only works by abandoning what the text and the prophets said. The Book of Mormon describes a land kept from other nations (2 Nephi 1), records no encounter with outsiders, and depicts Nephite-Lamanite populations in the hundreds of thousands; Joseph Smith and his successors identified all Native Americans as Lamanites. Genome-wide ancient and modern DNA (not only mtDNA and Y) now samples whole-genome ancestry, and Near Eastern admixture predating 1492 has not appeared anywhere in it. The defense therefore makes the book unfalsifiable on this point rather than supported.

What they get right: Skeptics overreach when they say DNA 'disproves' the Book of Mormon outright. It disproves the hemispheric reading the Church taught until 2006; it cannot exclude a small, fully absorbed colony.

Jeff Lindsay; B. H. Roberts Foundation (Mormonr); John Sorenson

The 2006 wording was no retreat: Anthony W. Ivins (1929), Janne Sjodahl (1938), Hugh Nibley (1952) and a 1960s Richard L. Evans pamphlet had already allowed for other peoples in the land, and Dallin H. Oaks said in 1993 that the book covers only a few peoples in a portion of the Americas. The 1981 introduction is not scripture.

The answer: The precedents are real and skeptics should acknowledge them. But they were minority scholarly opinions; what the Church printed in every copy of its scripture from 1981, what its missionaries taught indigenous converts across the Americas and the Pacific, and what its presidents preached was descent from Lehi. Murphy's point also stands: the text itself speaks of multitudes and promises a surviving, identifiable remnant, so shrinking the Lehites to a genetic trace rescues the book from the science by setting aside the book's own prophecies.

What they get right: The 'others were here' reading pre-dates the DNA controversy by decades, so it was not invented in response to it.

Rod Meldrum / FIRM Foundation (Heartland movement)

Haplogroup X2a among Great Lakes peoples is a Near Eastern lineage and marks Lehi's descendants in the North American 'Heartland'.

The answer: Raff and Bolnick show X2a is not found in the Middle East, no Middle Eastern X2 lineage is ancestral to it, it coalesces 14,000-17,000 years ago, and it is present in Kennewick Man millennia before Lehi. LDS geneticist Ugo Perego has made the same objections, so this is rejected by believing scientists as well as secular ones.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The critical case does not rest on a missing haplotype. It rests on the gap between what the Church taught and what it now says. For 150 years prophets, the 1981 introduction, and programs aimed at 'Lamanites' treated Native Americans and Polynesians as Lehi's children. When genetics showed an overwhelmingly Asian origin through Beringia, the Church changed one word of the introduction in 2006 and in 2014 published an essay conceding the Asian ancestry while arguing the Lehite signal could have been lost. That retreat is scientifically coherent but it contradicts the text's empty-land framing and the prophets' identifications, and it converts a once-testable claim into one that no genetic result could ever count against.

The apologetic case

A colony of a few dozen people arriving in an already populated hemisphere is exactly the case where uniparental markers are expected to disappear; the text never says the land was empty of everyone, and 'Lamanite' quickly becomes a political rather than a genetic label. On that reading DNA is simply silent, as the essay says.

What would change this

Pre-Columbian remains from a securely dated context carrying Near Eastern autosomal ancestry, published in a peer-reviewed genetics journal.

Closely related

Sources

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