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THE GENETIC EVIDENCE COMPARED WITH THE BOOK OF MORMON STORY It is well accepted that Native American genetic markers are dominated by indicators of descendancy from peoples of Siberia and northeast Asia , with a remainder consistent with genetic admixture after European contact in 1492 . Some genetic researchers such as Thomas W. Murphy and Simon Southerton emphasized that the substantial collection of Native American genetic markers now available are not consistent with any detectable presence of ancestors from the ancient Middle East, and argued that this poses substantial evidence to contradict the account in the Book of Mormon. REBUTTALS FROM BOOK OF MORMON DEFENDERS Defenders of the LDS Church have made arguments in return, generally centered on an argument that the Book of Mormon peoples from the Middle East formed only a small contribution to the population of the Americas, so that their genetic heritage may have been diluted beyond what can now be detected, so that the absence of evidence for Middle Eastern ancestors is not evidence of absence of the same. This may be particularly true, it is argued, because the Book of Mormon describes at least one major group of its Hebrew-descended peoples, the Nephites, being entirely wiped out during the fourth century AD. COUNTER-REBUTTAL: RELATIVE CONTRIBUTION OF BELIEVED HEBREW ANCESTRY While the typical rebuttal depends on the Book of Mormon peoples having constituted only a small fraction of the ancestry of Native Americans, critics indicate that presidents of the LDS Church have made several references to the Book of Mormon peoples being the principal ancestors of the Native Americans. In fact, the introduction to the current edition of the Book of Mormon states in part: "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." (see lds.org ) COUNTER-REBUTTAL: COMPARISON WITH THE LEMBA A counterargument to this rebuttal has been made by comparison with the Lemba ethnic group in southern Africa . The Lemba, a Black , Bantu -speaking people, practiced a religion very similar to Judaism , and had oral traditions that their ancestors were Jews who sailed to southern Africa from an ancestral land called Sena . They also had a patrilineal priestly clan called the Buba. After the advent of historical genetics, it was found that the Lemba did indeed have a preponderance of genetic markers on their Y Chromosome indicating over 80% of their ancestry was non-Arab Semitic; and even that their priestly Buba clan had a high frequency of a set of genetic markers known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype , which has been found to strongly correlate with members of the ''Kohanim'', or traditional patrilineal Jewish priestly clan, living in Israel . It has been calculated that the Lemba separated from the main body of Jews about three to five thousand before the present. The main group in the Book of Mormon is said to have left the Middle East about 2,600 years before the present. Therefore, it is argued, if the genetic evidence of Jewish descendancy remained so distinctly preserved in the Lemba during thousands of years of being surrounded by unrelated ethnic groups in southern Africa, there seems no reason why the same could not have been true of an analogous group in the Americas over about the same timeframe. FATE OF LDS GENETIC SCIENTISTS Murphy and Southerton were both members of the LDS Church when they began publishing their arguments that the Book of Mormon is not consistent with genetic evidence. Murphy gained significant media attention when his local church authorities suggested that he must recant his evidence or be excommunicated from the church, although the church authorities backed off and Murphy remains a member. Southerton, who was formerly a bishop of an LDS congregation, has since been excommunicated from the church for adultery. EXTERNAL LINKS
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