More Evidence for Pre-Nephite/Pre-Jaredite American Inhabitants

One of the more aggravating objections to the Book of Mormon that I see from time to time on various online forums is this idea that all original inhabitants of the Americas came from a single source: the Bering Strait. It usually takes the form of a statement like, "there's no evidence that anyone but Asians are the predecessors of Native Americans found when Columbus arrived..." or some such nonsense.

I've already written about this recently, and also earlier, and see also Steve Smoot's excellent DNA and the Book of Mormon article. But here comes yet another bit of scientific discovery that blows this limited and antiquated Beringian population group idea out of the water.

Brazilian rock shelter proves humans inhabited Americas 23,000 years ago

"The “First Americans” are usually believed to be East Asian migrants that crossed the Bering Straits 15,000 years ago, members of the Clovis Culture (a reference to their stone tool technology). A small number of researchers have suggested that an earlier group of migrants, from Europe’s Solutrean culture, arrived in North America a couple of millennia before these Clovis settlers, a hypothesis which was hotly disputed by academics... 

It now appears that researchers favoring both the Clovis and Solutrean models have got it all wrong and supporting the claim of “First Americans” should be given to a mysterious population living in Brazil over 23,000 years ago."

While there is still some reasonable doubt about the Solutrean (European) arrival and whether it was before or after the Beringian/Clovis culture, it's hard to find a way to refute the findings of the Brazilian site.

"Scientists utilized three separate dating methods to investigate samples of charcoal, sediment, and the sloth bones. The revealed dates securely place people at the Santa Elina site well over 23,120 years ago. Humans groups abandoned the site after a short period, but later groups utilized the rock shelter again between 10,120 and 2,000 years ago... 

The new dates from Santa Elina further erode the consensus understanding that the first modern humans reached the Americas by walking across the land bridge between Northeast Asia and North America 15,000 years ago. The rock shelter is thousands of miles from the proposed entry site.  

Not only is Santa Elina located far from even the earliest Clovis sites, it is also over 1,000 miles from the Brazilian coast in a heavily forested region. This seems like an unlikely first point of entry as it is logical to suspect that humans lived initially along the coastline before moving into the Brazilian interior by 23,000 years ago. This would seem to offer further support to claims that modern humans were in Brazil long before even this early period."

Again, what people thought they "knew" for certain is being upended by new findings. This is why when people say to me that there is no proof (such a sloppy word) or evidence (better) that there were Nephites or Lamanites or Jaredites or any connection whatsoever between ancient America and the Middle East, first I tell them all the new stuff we're finding followed by "and wait until you see what else the Lord will eventually reveal."

By faith and also by reason. That is how truth is discovered.

Is Mormonism a CULT?!

So? Is it?!

Well, that all depends on what you mean by "cult".

Jeff Lindsay, a Mormon apologist, put together a tongue-in-cheek website, MormonCult.org, to illustrate this concept. On the site he explains, in the voice of the Mormon church's detractors but while making the opposite argument, that he "pursued the most scholarly, objective approach [he] could take" and that "Mormons are clearly a cult". But the definitions he uses are the original ones right out of the dictionary.

Of course, Lindsay then goes on to explain, again tongue-in-cheek, how silly the new definition is and how it can be used to control peoples' thinking about religious groups that aren't a threat to anyone and just because they're "different".

Another great article about the Mormon church being a "cult" comes from esteemed AmericanTestament.com alumnus Stephen Smoot. He takes aim at a prominent ex-mormon podcasting duo who, under the very protective and controlling auspices of one of today's most prominent ex-mormons, have hurled this accusation at the Church in every episode.

But, as Smoot points out, they cannot or will not see that their own actions have put them and their efforts to discredit the Church squarely in the cross-hairs of that more modern definition of "cult".

So, now that we know that Mormonism is definitely a cult, also originally known as "a system of religious belief and worship", we can dispense with the silly name calling and mudslinging and focus on truth.

White Native Americans? New DNA Discovery Says "Yes".

When we talk about the Book of Mormon people, we often divide them into two categories: Nephites and Lamanites, with one group being light-skinned and another group being dark-skinned.

Well, it's not that simple, really. But cultural forces inside and outside the LDS church have sort of forced things into these polarizations.

The truth about the racial mix of human populations in reality is quite difficult to divide into two "racial" camps. Tribes and entire peoples intermarry and racial distinctions become hard to distinguish. Ultimately, we're just talking about one race...the human race...and nothing else about them really matters beyond that.

But if we're going to insist on going down this road of "who was white and who was not", we might as well start with a new DNA discovery that portrays the origins of at least some groups of original inhabitants of the American continents as distinctly white.

What scientists found predates even the earliest estimates of the arrival of the Jaredites (the first Book of Mormon people, even if their story appears at the end). 

About 11,500 years ago, just as the last ice age was drawing to a close, a woman gave birth in an Alaskan valley to a child who didn't live very long. She buried the remains next to another likely stillborn child (perhaps a cousin) in a burial pit. Those remains, discovered in 2013, hadn't been able to be fully analyzed until very recently.

Expecting the first child's DNA to come closer to matching modern Native American lineages, they discovered that the genetic markers pointed to a completely different origin. 

Named the "ancient Beringians", this group seems to have come from European groups nearly 20,000 years ago. They had come to Alaska over a frozen land bridge from Europe and Asia and then continued south, likely in a single wave.

Please know that by posting this I'm NOT jumping onto any bandwagons about which races might be superior or pure or chosen or "first" or any of that other nonsense. No way. I'm just interested in the science of migrating people and how that might have looked before, in, and after Book of Mormon times without regard to anyone's preconceived notions about whiteness, brownness, or blackness. 

That is all.

Find out more about this fascinating research at http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17060.full.