Can you imagine if Simon Southerton, Ugo Perego, & Thomas Murphy talked DNA at FIRM Foundation? In a way, they did! Here is my presentation from last April. I let these 3 experts talk DNA at FIRM Foundation conference where we also discussed geology in the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation…
DNA & Book of Mormon
GT 00:48 All right, I’m glad to be here today [at FIRM Foundation Conference.] Rod [Meldrum] and I have a couple of things, or one thing that’s in common. We love to talk about the Book of Mormon, especially Book of Mormon geography theories. The difference is, Rod thinks there’s one and only true theory, and I like to talk about all of them. We’re going to go over about 16 today. I actually gave a presentation like this about a year ago. And I’ve found about five new ones in the last three or four months. So, this is going to be new. Some of these are so new that I don’t even know that much about them.
GT 01:21 Anyway, before we go into that, I want to talk a little bit about the main categories of theories. We have internal theories, the Old World, which is a little bit more expansive than I think most people go into. The New World, and then the theory that I find least interesting, but the ones who aren’t believers are in the Book of Mormon, Joseph made it up. So, I will give a nod to them, just to know that I’m covering everything here, including that.
GT 01:54 Before we jump into these theories, one of the things I’d like to do is talk a little bit about some considerations that I think most people don’t spend a lot of time talking about. I had Jerry Grover on.[1] He’s actually speaking tomorrow, I understand, here at the FIRM Foundation. He has a book, a fantastic book called Geology of the Book of Mormon.[2] And so, the idea here is most people haven’t looked at the Book of Mormon from a geological point of view. Jerry does that. He’s got a background in geology. I’m going to tell you. I’m going to be giving pros and cons to all the theories. Personally, I am not married to any one theory, I just think it’s a fun thing to talk about. Jerry thinks that in 3rd Nephi, the destruction, in order to explain the mists of darkness and the earthquakes and everything, he believes that that sounds a lot like volcanic activity, if you remember Mount St. Helens big ash cloud. He says, actually, it took a lot of Mount St. Helens to do what happened in the Book of Mormon. And so he actually—Mesoamerica, I think people are kind of familiar with that. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. He thinks that’s actually a best fit, has a number of volcanoes and fault lines.
GT 03:21 There’s another theory that we’re going to be talking about today, the Yucatan Peninsula.[3] And he says that’s the most seismically stable area in Central America. I did ask him about the Heartland theory. I know that most of you here are Heartlanders. He doesn’t think the New Madrid fault fits geologically with the destruction found in the Book of Mormon. So, I’m just giving you guys a little preview on that. But a lot of people have asked him. Let’s look at some of these other theories. And you’re going to see, I think, I have 16 of them. And he says, “Well, it takes a lot of work to actually go through and look at all the papers on volcanoes and that sort of thing.” So, I’ve got a link to his book here. If you want to test any theory, the Heartland theory, Baja, Malay, all of them, you can use his book as a guidebook.
GT 04:21 Another consideration that I think people don’t pay much attention to is languages. If we believe that Lehi came to America, there should be some semblance of Hebrew. And so, Brian Stubbs has written a book called Changes in Languages From Nephi to Now.[4] And so, once again, it’s geographically agnostic. He claims that Ute and Aztec languages, known as Uto-Aztecan, bear a lot of similarities to Hebrew. Now, Ute and Aztec people are in the southwest of the United States. It doesn’t really match any current geography theory, perhaps Baja.[5] We’ll talk about Baja here in a little bit. But I believe that language of Native Americans and any matches to Hebrew is a very understudied area of the Book of Mormon. And I will even mention, I mentioned this to Brant Gardner[6] who’s a big Meso proponent, and he doesn’t like Brian’s work mainly because he didn’t match with Meso. The idea here is Jerry and Brian are two people who are not really here to backup any one theory, although I will say Jerry leans toward Meso. But these are things that I think are two understudied areas here of the Book of Mormon.
GT 05:54 Now, I know [for] a lot of Heartlanders, DNA is a big issue with the Book of Mormon. A lot of people are saying [that] there are no DNA matches to Native Americans. And I know Rod has been a big proponent of the X2A. And one of the things I love about Rod and also Jonathan Neville,[7] he wants people to have open ideas and open thoughts about these. And so, he’s allowing me, and I thank you, Rod, for giving a contrary point of view. And so I’ve got a little video. This is Simon Southerton. He’s a farmer believer, he doesn’t believe anymore. But he takes issue with the X2A and so I’m going to let [Simon speak.] Hopefully you guys will be able to hear Simon,[8] from his own words, talk about the X2A DNA match here.
Simon 06:54 The X is a name for a huge cluster of a very ancient family of mitochondrial DNA lineages. So, there’s an X1 branch, two main branches, X1 and X2. And then in the X2 branch, there’s X2A, right through to J, I think, ss the last one. And it’s in the X2A or the X2G lineage that we find in Native Americans, mostly X2A. And all of the other X2 lineages are in Eurasia somewhere. And one of them is amongst the Druze. And that’s the one Meldrum has paid all his attention to. It’s very distant. They share a common ancestor about 30,000 years ago. So, his claims are completely wrong. The X2A lineage of Native Americans has been there since the original founders. Ugo Perego[9] has done some beautiful work on the X2A and he’s found this arrived very early on.
GT 08:04 Okay, you’re saying that the X2A that’s in North America got here before Lehi did.
Simon 08:11 Yeah, well, allegedly. (Chuckling)
GT 08:18 If we believe that Lehi came here, it would have been here. It’s too early.
Simon 08:19 Yes, 20-30,000 years ago, or earlier.
GT 08:25 All right. So yeah, in summary, he says it’s way too old. Since he mentioned Ugo Perego, I had Ugo on my show[10] as well, back in 2017. And he talks a little bit more about X2A.
Ugo 08:42 The claim that this particular DNA marker is called X2A, found in North America is a proof of Book of Mormon remnants or legacy from the Middle East. It is a good thinking, but it is not founded. Research today, as we have it today, does not support that at all. In fact, are you familiar with the Kennewick man?
GT 09:08 A little bit.
Ugo 09:09 Kennewick man was a skeleton found on the Columbia River in the state of Washington, close to the Canadian border. And it was dated between 8000 to 9000 years with carbon dating. He has features that look like very much European, non-typical Native-American. A few years ago, there was a genetic sequence done on him and his DNA is Native American. And he belongs to X2A, which is the same marker that is the one that Ron Meldrum says is for the Great Lakes, but it’s founded on the west/northwest coast close to the Behringer passage. It is the oldest X2A found in America, meaning all the others are a subgroup of that one. So, it’s been here the longest. It’s there the 8000-9000 years. This autosomal DNA is only in America, so it’s not European. But he has this X2A. And besides X2A has never be found in the in the Middle East. Other X lineages have been found in the Middle East, but not this particular one. And X2A is not younger than the Middle Eastern lineages, meaning it did not come from them, genealogically. We call it phylogenetically, in genetics, which means genealogically. You have a father [before] you have a daughter or a son. You never have the son in your pedigree before you have the father. Does that make sense? That is an order. So, the X2A in America is not a daughter of the X’s in the Middle East. As of today, they’ve never found any X2A in any other parts of the world, but the Americas. And because the Kennewick man has these features, it seems to me to point more toward a Beringia arrival unlike the other. In fact, we are publishing a new paper with a group at the University of Illinois, on the ancient X2A samples found in Alaska.
Simon 09:16 Of course, Ugo was the one who wrote the Gospel Topics Essay.[11] He’s a population geneticist. I’ll just add that as well. And then, finally, I know I’ve been hitting the DNA hard. My last expert here is Dr. Thomas Murphy,[12] who taught at Edmonds College up in Washington.
Thomas 11:44 Basically, there’s a branch of the X lineage called X2A that is unique to Native Americans. And this X lineage, there are other branches of X lineage that are found in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa. And Meldrum keys in on that, and he calls it European DNA, or Middle Eastern DNA. Well, yeah, it is found out in the Middle East. It’s also found in Europe, and he has also asked me to call an African DNA. That doesn’t help his story. Right?
GT 12:26 Well, that will help with the black Lamanites, right? (Chuckling)
Thomas 12:30 Again, so he tries to present these other matches of the X lineage, as somehow evidence that there were people of Middle Eastern ancestry or ancient Near Eastern ancestry in the Americas. That’s not what the DNA evidence shows. Those are separate lineages that never came to the Americas. The only lineage that came to the Americas is that X2A and it separated, if I remember the dates right, 20,000 years ago, if I remember right.
GT 13:06 Which is earlier than Lehi, right?
Thomas 13:08 Yeah, way, way earlier.
GT 13:12 So, anyway, those are some things that I just wanted to bring up off the top.
{End of Part 1}
[1] See https://gospeltangents.com/jerry-grover
[2] Can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3whjXrS
[3] See https://gospeltangents.com/science/yucatan/
[4] Can be purchased at https://amzn.to/4fkjklf
[5] See https://gospeltangents.com/science/baja/
[6] See https://gospeltangents.com/people/brant-gardner
[7] See https://gospeltangents.com/people/jonathan-neville
[8] See https://gospeltangents.com/2018/05/02/simon-southerton-talks-dna-excommunication/
[9] See https://gospeltangents.com/people/ugo-perego
[10] See https://gospeltangents.com/2017/08/23/dna-101-dr-ugo-perego/
[11] See https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng
[12] See https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy
