Book of Mormon Genetics: Good News and Bad News

As scientists have uncovered the genetic heritage of Native Americans, they've consistently found that heritage is rooted in ancient East Asia. Since this conflicts with expectations based on traditional interpretation of the Book of Mormon, a number of arguments have been put forward to explain why a Middle-Eastern genetic signal has not been found [1]. These arguments are summarized in the Church's Gospel Topics essay that treats this issue.

One of those arguments is that a genetic bottleneck may have removed the genetic markers of Book of Mormon peoples so that they cannot be found among living descendants. As the essay puts it:

In addition to the catastrophic war at the end of the Book of Mormon, the European conquest of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries touched off just such a cataclysmic chain of events. As a result of war and the spread of disease, many Native American groups experienced devastating population losses. One molecular anthropologist observed that the conquest “squeezed the entire Amerindian population through a genetic bottleneck.” He concluded, “This population reduction has forever altered the genetics of the surviving groups, thus complicating any attempts at reconstructing the pre-Columbian genetic structure of most New World groups.”

A recent study [2] adds support to this argument. The scientists sequenced the whole mitochondrial genome obtained from 92 pre-Columbian South American skeletons that range in age from 500 years ago to 8.6 thousand years ago. As the abstract puts it:

All of the ancient mitochondrial lineages detected in this study were absent from modern data sets, suggesting a high extinction rate.

This result directly supports the argument that many genetic lineages have been lost. That's the good news.

The bad news is that all of those lost lineages fall within the standard family of mtDNA haplogroups one would expect to find based on the ancient East Asian origin of Native Americans. In other words, although those lineages apparently went extinct, they are still within the family of lineages that were brought by the original Asian colonizers of the Americas.

If you look at the map from the supplementary materials, you'll see that the samples came from areas not generally considered Book of Mormon lands. Further, only two of the samples are dated from within the time frame of the main Book of Mormon narrative [3]. The rest of the samples are either prior to 600 BC, or after 400 AD (though still pre-Columbian). So it's not like this is some kind of slam dunk against the Book of Mormon. However, it does help to establish the perimeter of genetic plausibility.

It will be interesting to see what data emerges as the spaciotemporal resolution of such studies increases.




Notes:
1. X2a doesn't appear to fit the bill because even if it originated in the Middle East, it entered the Americas at least 8-9,000 years ago--too early for accepted Book of Mormon chronology.

2. Llamas B, Fehren-Schmitz L, Valverde G, et al. Ancient mitochondrial DNA provides high-resolution time scale of the peopling of the Americas. Sci Adv. 2016 Apr 1;2(4):e1501385. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1501385

3. Maybe. The range of uncertainty in dating those two samples (325-440 AD; 100-650 AD) is such that they might fall just outside of Moroni's lifetime.

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