The Myth of “Pure” Genetic Heritage
First, in May 2017, Ann Gibbons,
a correspondent for Science magazine, discussed the
myth of “pure” genetic heritage in light of the influx of Syrian refugees
to places throughout Europe. Some neo-Nazi’s in Germany were concerned about
“the destruction of our genetic heritage.” According to Gibbons, however, “the
German people have no unique genetic heritage to protect.” Clearly,
Germans exist, and like most nationalities and ethnicities, have their
own unique cultural heritage, and stories of national origin. But while
those origin stories do, indeed, have some grounding in real historical
events, they are both an exaggeration and an oversimplification of the people’s
collective origins. In reality, all peoples are, genetically speaking, “a
mishmash.”
Gibbons goes through a variety of
different European cultures and ethnicities to further illustrate the point.
The 11th century Book of Invasions recounts the story of the Sons of
Míl Espáine, wanderers from Spain who created “a modern Irish people
distinct from the British—and linked to the Spanish.” Yet, according geneticist
Walter Bodmer (as cited by Gibbons), only “a very small ancient Spanish
contribution” has been found in British and Irish DNA. The Celtic roots of the
Irish, Scots, and Welsh (drawn from the Book of Invasions and other
medieval texts), also lack DNA corroboration. “Try as they might,” explains
Gibbons, “researchers so far haven’t found anyone, living or dead, with a
distinct Celtic genome.”
The Angle-Saxon Chronicle
recounts “fierce conflict” between the invading Angles and Saxons and the
native Britons in southeast England in the 5th century AD. While such violence between native and
invading peoples was likely real, studies on ancient DNA in the same region
from the 5th and 6th century reveals that Angles, Saxons, and Britons also
lived side-by-side and even interbred.
The point is that, as Lynn Jorde,
a population geneticist from the University of Utah, puts it, “We can falsify
this notion that anyone is pure” (as quoted by Gibbons). After discussing the
case of the Philistines (see below), Gibbons also quotes Israeli archaeologist
Aren Maeir: “Ethnic groups in the past and present create an ‘imagined past’ of
the longtime and ‘pure’ origins of their group,” but the group's actual history
is always more complicated than their origin stories.
Like the Germans, Irish, Celts,
and others discussed in the article, the actual history of the Nephites,
Lamanites, Mulekites, and Jaredites is going to be a lot more complicated than
their oversimplified lineage histories recorded in the Book of Mormon would
suggest. This would include genetic admixture from indigenous populations
which goes unmentioned (or is merely hinted at) in the text.
It is revealing that some ethnic
and cultural groups—such as the Germans and the Celts, as mentioned
above—evidently have no distinctive genetic heritage to speak of. Yet Germans
and Celts obviously still exist. Thus, lack of identifiable “Lamanite” DNA does
not prove that people with a “Lamanite” cultural identity (and origin story
tracing their lineage simplistically back to Laman and Lemuel) never existed.
Of course, the premise of the genetic
studies discussed above is that they are detecting lots and lots of migrations
and population shifts that more simplified national origin myths do not account
for. This may lead some to think that even if the history of the Nephites and
Lamanites is more complicated than that presented in the Book of Mormon, surely
their migrations should be detectable too, right? For this, we
turn to another article that came out in 2017.
Africans in Roman-era Britain
In August 2017, there was a big
controversy over the portrayal of a Roman officer in Britain as being black in
a BBC cartoon. To me, honestly, it seems silly, but some people were really
upset about this because, they claimed, a black Roman officer was
anachronistic. Classicist Mary Beard defended
the cartoon as “pretty accurate,” noting that there was evidence for black
Roman officers in Britain. Those who insisted it was inaccurate pointed to the
lack of African DNA in the British genome.
Jennifer Raff, a population
geneticist, responded
to these arguments, and she did so using essentially the same arguments Ugo
Perego and others (including the
official essay on ChurchOfJesusChrist.org) have used for explaining the
lack of DNA evidence for Book of Mormon migrations.
Raff notes that “the genetic
makeup of a region often changes over time” due to factors like genetic drift.
“Uniparental markers, like mitochondrial (only maternally inherited) and Y
chromosome (only paternally inherited) DNA are particularly affected by genetic
drift. If a mitochondrial or Y chromosome lineage was rare in a population,
it’s likely that it would have disappeared from the population over time and
not be seen in contemporary inhabitants of the region.” This is exactly
what Latter-day Saint geneticists have been saying about the DNA of founders
such as Lehi, Sariah, Ishmael, Mulek, and Jared, whose mtDNA and YcDNA would
naturally be only a small drop in the bucket compared the larger indigenous
populations that would already be here.
Quoting from British geneticist
Adam Rutherford, Raff points out another example of a people who have left no
genetic trace in Britain, despite a known history of migration and invasion: “there
is virtually no trace of the Danes in the British genome. … there’s an absence
of Danish DNA despite a long adventure here.” Raff goes on, “There are similar
cases all over the world, including from my own area of research, the Americas.”
She talks about the Vikings known to occupy a site in Newfoundland ca. AD 1000,
“yet no genetic traces of the Norse can be found in either contemporary or
ancient Native American populations. That may mean that there was no admixture
(mating) taking place between Norse and indigenous populations, or perhaps that
it was on such a small scale that traces were erased over time.”
Raff also stressed the inadequacy
of our current knowledge. “If ancient DNA has taught us anything, it’s that you
cannot universally reconstruct population histories on the basis of
contemporary patterns of genetic diversity.” We need to study samples of
ancient genetic data to get a fuller picture of the genetic diversity in
antiquity. In order to achieve this, testing and sampling of ancient DNA “will
need to be done on a much wider scale than present, across both time and space,
and we will need to target specific individuals suspected of being non-local in
order to observe lineages present in the past at rare frequencies.” She warns
that this can’t be done with selective sampling of elites; “one has to be very
careful about designing a study intended to accurately characterize genetic
variation in an entire population.” In Britain—and, I suspect, most other parts
of the world, “these types of ancient DNA surveys are being done,” but “aren’t
comprehensive and much more work remains to be done by future investigators.”
All of these factors are relevant
to claims about DNA and the Book of Mormon. In particular, it seems worth
noting that to date, no formal DNA study has been carefully designed to
specifically look for the unique, non-local DNA potentially brought to the
Americas by the small migrations reported in the Book of Mormon. As one
Latter-day Saint geneticist pointed out some years ago, it is doubtful such
a study could actually be done.
Rapid Disappearance of Philistine DNA
As noted, Raff talked about the
need for more comprehensive studies of ancient DNA across time and space, with
targeted focus on likely non-local individuals in order to better understand the
genetic history of a region. In July 2019, Michal Feldman and Johannes Krause, both
from the archaeogenetics department at the Max Planck Institute, published just such a study
in the journal Science Advances, with the help of other archaeologists
and geneticists. Their study focused on ancient biblical site of Ashkelon, one
of five cities linked to the “Philistines”—part of the migratory “Sea People”
who came from somewhere across the Mediterranean. The Philistines are typically
thought to come from the Aegean (i.e., Greek) region around the 13th–12th
century BC.
Sure enough, Feldman and Krause
et al. found “a European-related gene flow introduced in Ashkelon during either
the end of the Bronze Age or the beginning of the Iron Age. This timing is in
accord with estimates of the Philistines arrival to the coast of the Levant,
based on archaeological and textual records.” This success was made possible by
highly ideal circumstances. Researchers knew exactly where and when
to look for non-local gene flow, and had a pretty good idea of what they
should be looking for, too. In addition, the Levant is a relatively ideal place
for DNA preservation (yet they still had to go through 108 samples to find 10
with usable DNA), and migration of the “Sea Peoples” represents a fairly sizable
influx of foreign peoples—they had enough people to mount military campaigns
against Egyptian and Israelites, according historical sources.
Despite all of that, however, the
Philistines had no lasting impact on the genetic make up of the Levant. Feldman
and Krause et al. found that “within no more than two centuries, this genetic
footprint introduced during the early Iron Age is no longer detectable and
seems to be diluted by a local Levantine-related gene pool.” This is not
because Philistines themselves disappeared. Ann Gibbons talks about the
Philistines in her 2017
Science article (see above), noting that archaeologist Aren Maeir “thinks
that the Philistines soon intermarried with people already living in Canaan
instead of going extinct.” According to Lawrence A. Sinclair, “The history of
the Philistines can be traced from the period of the judges to the fall of Jerusalem”
using Biblical, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian records.[1]
So while the Philistines persisted
as a people until the ca. late 7th–6th century BC, they quickly became
genetically indistinguishable from the others around them. This is consistent
with the previous
findings of Richard Green et al. (which also lists Johannes Krause as a
contributor), that “detectable gene flow is predicted to almost always be from the
resident population into the colonizing population, even if gene flow also
occurred in the other direction.” In
other words, when a group of people settles into a new territory and integrates
themselves into the existing population, their genes disappear, and they
disappear quite quickly.
The application to the Book of
Mormon here should be obvious. Lehi and his family, the group that came with
Mulek, and the brother of Jared and his people were all colonizing
populations, and comparatively small ones, at that. If Philistine DNA disappeared
within two centuries, then whatever limited gene flow might have happened with the
arrivals of Lehi, Mulek, Jared and their respective groups would almost certainly
be indiscernible within a few generations—despite the fact that cultural groups
known as Nephites, Lamanites, Mulekites, and Jaredites not only survived but
even thrived in the region for a considerable span of time.
According to Feldman and Krause
et al., this rapid disappearance of Philistine DNA underscores several of the
limitations Raff (and Latter-day Saint geneticists) have alluded to:
The relatively rapid disappearance of this
signal stresses the value of temporally dense genetic sampling for addressing
historical questions. Transient gene flows, such as the one detected here,
might be overlooked because of a lack of representative samples, potentially leading
to erroneous conclusions. In geographic regions unfavorable to DNA
preservation, obtaining such datasets requires exhaustive sampling and the
utilization and further development of advanced technologies such as DNA
enrichment techniques and targeted sampling strategies.
Once again, nothing like this has
been done to try and identify DNA potentially relevant to the Book of Mormon,
and it is unlikely it even could be. Lehi and his family, as well as the
Mulekites and the Jaredites, are very small groups, and we cannot pinpoint an
exact place to look for their genes. Furthermore, Mesoamerica—the most likely
location of their landing—is a much less ideal place for preservation of
genetic samples.
Main Take Aways
I know this article has been a bit
long. I’ve sprinkled insights into the Book of Mormon DNA issue throughout, but
for the sake clarity and convenience I wanted to summarize some of the main “take
aways” from all of this. This does not include all insights and
applications to the Book of Mormon discussed above, but these are the key issues
that I think are most important here:
1. The notion of a “pure” Nationality,
Ethnicity, or Culture Group is nonsense. If genetic studies have
complicated superficial readings of the Book of Mormon, and assumptions of
Nephites, Lamanites, etc. as “pure” descendants of their founding groups, then
the Book of Mormon is hardly alone in this matter. Gibbons shows that stories
of national origins, founding migrations, and group exclusivity the world over
are being shown by genetic studies to be exaggerated and oversimplified. All
peoples are more genetically diverse and mixed than such stories tend to
account for. If we are going to take the Book of Mormon seriously as
history, then we cannot assume that Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, etc. are
somehow exempt from this universal truth.
2. Genetic studies do not tell
the whole story of migration history. Even as studies in population
genetics reveal evermore about the complicated history of human movement, Raff
shows that these studies have their limitations and cannot ultimately detect
every incursion of different peoples into broader populations, as illustrated
by the lack of African DNA in British genetics. Issues like genetic drift are legitimate
obstacles to detecting small gene flows into a larger population. Again, if
we are going to take the Book of Mormon seriously as history, then we cannot
dismiss or ignore these issues as “apologetic excuses.”
3. Detecting minor influxes of
DNA require highly specific data. Both Raff and Feldman and Krause et al. make
the point that if we are ultimately going to detect even small genetic influxes
into a population, then we need highly specific data. We need to be studying DNA
from ancient remains, not just modern populations, and we need to know where
(specific archaeological sites) and when (chronological time period) to look
to find likely samples of non-local DNA, and then we need to know what (the
outside genetic population to compare with) to look for. Nothing like this
has been done to test for the migrations hypothesized by the Book of Mormon, and
given various limitations and uncertainties, it is unlikely such a hypothesis could be tested.
4. Genetic admixture from
colonizing populations disappears quickly from the gene pool. Even when an
ancient migration is found under highly ideal circumstances for detecting
non-local genetic contributions, the evidence indicates that these foreign genes
disappear quickly. Feldman and Krause et
al. found that it took no more than 200 years for Philistine DNA to become
indistinguishable from the broader Iron Age Levant population. All the
migrations mentioned in the Book of Mormon are much smaller than the Philistine
migrations, and demographer James E. Smith estimated
that the Nephites would have only numbered around 1000–2000 people after about
200 years. This means that by the time Nephites and Lamanites had built up
sizable populations, traces of their Near Eastern DNA were probably already
lost.
All together, these observations
mean that it is unsurprising that the migrations mentioned in the Book of
Mormon are undetectable by means of genetic analysis. Based on present
knowledge, this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
[1]
Lawrence A. Sinclair, “Philistines,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible,
ed. David Noel Freedman (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 1050.
I've long wondered how the Nephites could have had plural wives and concubines in such a short time after arrival in the land of Nephi--as in the book of Jacob. The extra women must have been from local populations.
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