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This remains an active area of research, but it would not be accurate to claim that current science provides a model of these matters which allows haplogroup X to support the Book of Mormon. | This remains an active area of research, but it would not be accurate to claim that current science provides a model of these matters which allows haplogroup X to support the Book of Mormon. | ||
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+ | {{Critical sources box:Book of Mormon/DNA evidence/Geography issues/Haplogroup X2a/CriticalSources}} | ||
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Some claim that the Book of Mormon fits best in a geography located around the Great Lakes, and that this is supported by a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) group called Haplogroup X2a.
While interesting, at present it does not seem that haplogroup X can serve as good evidence of the Book of Mormon's antiquity given the problems of dating and the failure of the model to come to grips with textual issues from the Book of Mormon. Doing so would require us to misrepresent the current state of scientific evidence. This claim also fails to interact responsibly with a fairly large body of literature which has led most LDS scholars to reject the Great Lakes region as a feasible match to the Book of Mormon's requirements.
This conclusion will, of course, need to be revised if further information comes to light.
An additional argument for a Great Lakes setting is made on textual grounds.
While FairMormon applauds the efforts of Latter-day Saints to defend the Book of Mormon against critics' attacks, at present we feel unable to endorse this idea as persuasive evidence for the Book of Mormon's antiquity.
FairMormon and outside experts have examined the views of some enthusiasts on this point. The proponents' goal is to support the Book of Mormon with DNA by tracking mtDNA haplogroup X among native Americans.
The theory postulates that haplogroup X comes from the Levant (i.e., Israel/Palestine), and then reaches Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Western New York with the Lehi colony. Proponents of this model argue, then, that this group actually sailed around Africa and up through the South Atlantic and into the Gulf of Mexico. They then have them landing in what is now Louisiana.
But when Nephi's group fled from Laman's faction, advocates of this model have both the Nephi and Laman factions migrating north to the area designated above. There is no textual evidence in the Book of Mormon to support this, or an Atlantic crossing for the Lehi colony.
As LDS geneticist Ugo Perego put the matter:
Haplogroup X, which is centered in Europe and the Levant is thought to have reached North America much earlier than the Lehi party, and to have brought the distinctive Clovis culture to the Americas (which dates from before 12,000 years ago). This culture involves what is often called the Clovis Point tools—that is, pressure flaked tools (arrow heads and so forth), which are not found in Alaska and Asia. This has led some revisionists to advance what has been called the Solutrean Hypothesis—that is, that haplogroup X got to North America (and specifically to the northeast) by people migrating from Europe on tiny skin boats along the edge of ice flows. Even if true, what exactly any of this has to do with the Book of Mormon is not clear, since such immigration would precede Lehi by thousands of years according the current scientific understanding.
Thus, even if haplogroup X2a has its origins on the Middle East, if those origins are thousands of years before the Book of Mormon timeframe, it is difficult to use them as strong evidence for the Book of Mormon account. At best, this demonstrates that the Bering land bridge is not the only source of the pre-Columbian American Indians.
In addition, many of these proponents have not addressed the sophisticated literature already published on the Book of Mormon by believing scholars. For example, they have not come to grips with archaeologist John Clark's assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a Great Lakes model.
A paleo-Indian burial site in Windover, Florida has been carbon-dated to between 6980–8120 ± 100 years ago. Human brain tissue was extracted from mummified remains, and mtDNA was sequenced. It found haplogroups A, B, C, and D—and some unidentified haplogroups. This was in 1994, and so haplogroup X had not been named and characterized. But, later reports indicate that haplogroup X was found in the sample—demonstrating that (barring modern contamination) Lehi's migration 2,600 years ago cannot be the sole original source of haplogroup X in the Americas, if it is such a source at all.[2] This means that haplogroup X cannot tell us anything about Lehi, since other sources for haplogroup X in the Americas exist.
A February 2008 genetics study on American population migration states:
This remains an active area of research, but it would not be accurate to claim that current science provides a model of these matters which allows haplogroup X to support the Book of Mormon.
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