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In Sunday School we learn that God created the earth in 6 days. Many people believe that this is about 6000 years. On the other hand, evolution and geology seem to show the earth is much older than that. Were Adam & Eve the first humans on the earth? What does Dr. Ugo Perego think about these topics?
Ugo: Even if I am a scientist and I like to push boundaries of knowledge, when it comes to things that pertain to the church either you sustain brethren or you don’t. Either you can go with what they are doing or try to see things why they are doing and you accept that or you don’t. In my mind is if the church openly has said that we don’t have an official position on what happened before Adam and Eve, how Adam and Eve came to be as physical beings, we don’t have an opinion or revelation or a position on evolution. We don’t have a position with Book of Mormon geography. We don’t have a position on the Nephites, of the biological population of the Nephites to the American continent, then you are leaving a lot of room open for everything. Everybody can be correct and everybody can be wrong when it comes to their point.
Maybe I’m too naïve but I still don’t understand why some people become so feisty—is that the right word, feisty—about issues where the church has decided not to take a position on it. There must be some reason why they didn’t. I don’t think it is fear. I don’t think they have the answers and they don’t want to tell you.
It doesn’t matter if Bruce McConkie said so and so, if Joseph Fielding Smith said that, if Joseph Smith said that. If the church says today that we don’t have an official position about Book of Mormon geography, that is the final answer. That is it.
Just express your thoughts, share your conclusion, share what evidence that you have about your ideas, but don’t impose them, don’t come to me and say you are wrong because I am right. I am sticking with the brethren. This is my position.
Going to your question, can there have been people living in America 15,000 years ago, pre-flood time, pre-Adam and Eve time? The answer is, why not? Because the [LDS] Church does not have a position about who lived before Adam and Eve. We know through revelation there was an Adam and Eve. We know that we are descendants of them, but the Church has never said there was nothing before. They haven’t said that.
Many of you remember the dark day of September 11, 2001 when Muslim terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a dark day in U.S. history. 160 years ago this September 11th is another dark day in Mormon history as Mormon settlers in southern Utah attacked and killed 120 men, women, and children known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Can DNA help solve the Mountain Meadows Massacre?
Mountain Meadows Massacre
It turns out that there has been some DNA tests done to answer some questions about that horrific incident. It’s a pretty interesting conversation. Dr. Ugo Perego will introduce a little bit of the massacre, and talk about his tests to answer questions about the DNA of certain people in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Ugo: The claim was out of this party of 120 people that left Arkansas and were moving to California as they went through the Salt Lake Valley and then down all the way through Fillmore and Cedar City and out into the Mountain Meadows area. After the ambush was done by local Mormons, local people that lived in the area and Native [American]s, there were 120 people that were exterminated. They were all killed except children age 8 or younger.
But the number of those children that were spared has never really been confirmed. That was some early sources. The first sources say 17, but soon that number became 18, and most documents and books that have been written on the subject carry on with this 18 number. Why is this important?
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The records said that only 17 of these 18 children were identified and returned to relatives in Arkansas.
So who was the 18th child? What happened to this child? Who was it? As years went by there had been rumors that one of these children was the oldest daughter of Bishop Klingonsmith who was involved with the massacre. He’s there.
GT: So the daughter was essentially adopted by Bishop Klingonsmith.
Ugo: That’s what the claim was. The 18th child was the one that was not returned. So it’s making something bad into something worse because now you have a child that doesn’t belong to you. Give it back to the family, right? So there were all these controversies surrounding [the incident.] The people involved have already been dead. Bishop Klingonsmith has been dead. The daughter died.
So what we have are people in this century in this past 150 years trying to collect information and putting pieces together. So what we have is rumors that the child, Priscilla was her name which by the way the massacre took place as you say on September 11, 1857. Priscilla was born in 1855 which placed her at the age group of two being one of the children that could have been spared. So we have her born in 1855, Bishop Klingonsmith being involved with the massacre, being there so he could be one of the people that took a child in, and there is no birth certificate for this girl, nowhere to be found.
Listen to find out what the results of the test were.
DNA Test #2
But that’s not the only question Dr. Perego answered.
Locals claim, and that’s what’s in the record, the party that was going through poisoned the springs which caused some of the animals to die in an attempt to actually kill the people there. Now this is absurd because to put poison in a spring, which is running water to the extent that it the poison stayed there, you need a tremendous amount. At that time there was folk magic, these ideas that things can actually happen without being able to test the possibility that you can actually do something like that.
But the problem was that they gave this cattle that were dead as a gift to the local natives as a right to pass. Native Americans do accept gifts of dead animals. They are a little bit, at least this part I’m not an expert in anthropological and cultural Native Americans, but from what I read, they’re kind of a little bit like scavengers. They will eat whatever they could eat. At that time it seems like it was an acceptable thing. They received these dead animals, and the natives died. They got really sick and they died.
A local child from a family, as he was trying to take the skin off of one of those cows; what’s the name, hive?
GT: The hyde.
Ugo: The hyde? As he was trying to take the hyde off, scratched his face, and within a few days he was dead, devastating dead. His whole face blew out, really swollen and blood coming out everywhere and he died.
GT: This was a Mormon child.
Ugo agrees: A Mormon child in Fillmore. It was Proctor Robinson, and I think he died at age 16, just a few days after the massacre as the disease developed. Because of these things, the theory is that escalated the conflict between Native [American]s, Mormons, and the party.
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Rick Turley believed that anthrax could have been the reason why these animals died. That’s just his idea. He asked me if I could look into that from a scientific point of view. What I did was I gathered some information with regards to, first of all how anthrax is manifested, how it affects individuals and animals, because at that time anthrax was not known. It was probably endemic in America. There were many cases of it but people just didn’t know the cause of it. It was not yet identified and classified as a pathogen.
Dr. Perego got permission to dig up the bones of Proctor Robinson to try to determine if he died of anthrax! Check out our conversation…..
