Simon Southern reporting on Mormon's new DNA research

[BartBurk]

Over at the Recovery from Mormonism board Simon Southerton is reporting on research done by Scott Woodward, a Mormon scientist studying Native American DNA. While Woodward still believes in the Book of Mormon, his research is strongly contradicting it. Quoting Simon:

When I resigned in 1998 after discovering DNA evidence that American Indians were essentially all descended from Asian ancestors, I was counseled by the Area Presidency to get in touch with Professor Scott Woodward, a “world-renowned DNA expert” at BYU. In a handful of email exchanges that I had with Woodward, in amongst his lengthy molecular apologetics, he admitted that he had found it difficult to talk to other people about the DNA work and that after a few years of struggling he had reconciled most of the issues it raised. I met Woodward when I visited the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF) in Salt Lake City a few years ago. At the time he angrily defended the Book of Mormon and hinted that SMGF scientists were finding exciting new evidence that supported the Book of Mormon (must be still finding it).

This month in the scientific journal Current Biology, Woodward co-authors a research paper that clearly demonstrates that the ancestors the American Indians arrived in North America over 15,000 years ago via two routes from Asia. The founders brought 5 major maternal DNA lineages with them, named A, B, C D and X. One group of founders brought the X lineage to the region adjacent to the Great Lakes as they migrated between ice sheets across what is now central Canada. The other group followed the Pacific coast, probably bringing the other four DNA lineages (A, B, C and D).

In this paper Woodward helps bury a pile of apologetic trash from both the Mesoamerican (church approved) and Heartland (church still watching) Geographists who have variously claimed in the past that the X lineage came from Israel. The X lineage is conclusively shown to have arrived in the New World thousands of years before the Book of Mormon period.

But Woodward is not always so open with his research. Back in 1998 Woodward told me that his group had DNA tested 6500 American Indians from Peru. I could hardly believe it. All other research groups combined at the time had only DNA tested about 2000 American Indians across the entire New World! There can be little doubt that Woodward had been hunting for Lamanite DNA but apologists of course would deny this. Woodward clearly found none because those Peruvian DNA lineages remain unpublished over a decade later.

Woodward is now leading an organization (SMGF) that has much more DNA data on American Indians than any other group in the world. His group has undoubtedly DNA tested thousands of individuals from Central America including Mesoamerica. Woodward knows that Mayans, Mesoamericans, Central Americans etc don’t have Israelite ancestors. How long he will hold on to this truth is anyone’s guess. Thankfully there is a public effort in progress that will be looking at large numbers of American Indians from all across the Americas. genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/about.html
We can expect that data to be published in a timely manner over the next couple of years.

The abstract of the article can be found here:

cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(08)01618-7