Horses and other Old World livestock
The book has horses, cattle, sheep, goats, swine, asses and elephants in ancient America; none is attested there in the period.
What the Church claims
Lehi's party found horses, cows, oxen, asses and goats c. 590 BC; Nephites and Lamanites kept horses and chariots; Jaredites had elephants.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The mainstream record is uniformly negative and the only positive study is unreplicated. The claim is not quite dead only because the direct dating of a Book of Mormon-era horse could in principle overturn the picture.
The record
- American horses are conventionally held to have died out at the end of the Pleistocene; no Mesoamerican art, text, midden or burial from 2500 BC to AD 1500 shows a horse, cow, sheep, goat or pig.
- Miller et al., 'Post-Pleistocene Horses (Equus) from Mexico', Texas Journal of Science 74:1 (2022), report 19 radiocarbon dates 'tied as closely as possible' to horse fossils and strata at Rancho Carabanchel, San Luis Potosi, with Equus in Holocene layers. Lead author Wade Miller is a retired BYU geologist.
- Roper scores the Miller result only 'partially confirmed' because the dates are on associated material rather than bone collagen.
- Taylor et al., Science 379 (2023), found that horses on the Plains by the early 1600s were of Spanish descent, with no link to extinct American horses; the paper supports early Indigenous adoption of Spanish horses, not pre-Columbian survival.
- Roper's chart splits horses into four items and elephants into three, scoring the Pleistocene-fossil items 'confirmed'.
- Late proboscidean dates cited by apologists are c. 7500 BC (Guatemala) and c. 3700 BC (an island population in the Bering Sea).
The moving target
There is no official position on Book of Mormon horses. No Gospel Topics essay, manual or conference talk names the problem or offers an answer to it, and the surviving-horse and loan-shift arguments below were developed entirely outside the Church. The Church's curriculum reads the horse passages straight and does not raise the question, so there is nothing here that has moved — only a silence the Church has kept for nearly two centuries while its defenders changed answers repeatedly underneath it.
The exchange
Scripture Central (2023); Roper (2025); Wade Miller
Horses survived: Holocene-dated horse remains in Mexico overlap Jaredite and Nephite times.
The answer: The dates are on associated strata rather than on bone collagen, at a spring site where reworking of older fossils is a known hazard, in a regional journal, and the result has not been replicated; Roper himself scores it only partially confirmed. Even if it holds, stray survivors in northern Mexico are not domestic herds and chariot teams in a Maya-area kingdom.
What they get right: Scripture Central words this carefully, as a developing and testable hypothesis, and direct collagen dating could settle it.
John L. Sorenson; FAIR
'Horse' is a loan-shift for tapir or deer.
The answer: FAIR labels this 'plausibility only' and notes most apologists now prefer real horses. The text pairs horses with chariots and has them fed, prepared and herded.
Roper (2025), citing Indigenous accounts
Native oral traditions say horses were always here.
The answer: Taylor et al. 2023, co-authored with Lakota scholars, tested exactly this and found Spanish ancestry in the earliest Plains horses.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
Horses are the clearest case of the chart's method. The criticism is that the book has domestic horses in the Americas between about 2500 BC and AD 400. Three of the four 'horse' items confirm things no critic since Darwin has denied. The fourth rests on one unreplicated paper and is scored partial by Roper himself. The loan-shift alternative is mutually exclusive with the real-horse claim, and apologists advance both. The same analysis applies with more force to cattle, sheep, goats and swine, for which not even an outlier study exists.
The apologetic case
Absence of bones is weaker evidence than it looks: the Huns left almost no horse bones, and tropical soils destroy bone. Horses in the text are few, elite and never ridden. If a relict population survived in Mexico, as Miller's dates suggest, the problem disappears.
What would change this
Direct AMS dates on horse bone collagen, or ancient DNA, from a secure pre-Columbian cultural context in Mesoamerica, replicated by an independent lab.
Sources
- Anachronisms ... Chapter 1: Book of Mormon Animals
- Debunking FairMormon - Book of Mormon
- Book of Mormon Evidence: Horses
- Wade E. Miller et al. publishes evidence for horses in the Americas during the Post-Pleistocene/Pre-Columbian era (record of 'Post-Pleistocene Horses (Equus) from Mexico', Texas Journal of Science 74:1, 2022)
- Horses came to American West by early 1600s, study finds
- Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies
- Horses: Loanshifting - deer and tapirs
- Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon (tertiary finder)
- Book of Mormon Overview: Anachronisms and What Isn't in the Book of Mormon
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