FARMS Is At It Again

In Stewart's scenario, modern Asians are Israelites—the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. His evidence for this comes from patriarchal blessings rumored to have stated as much. In order to defend his speculation, Stewart glosses over the accepted range of dates for the settlement of various regions of the world, rejecting the consensus view of scientists and ironically complaining about the "profound intellectual poverty" of "self-proclaimed experts." He quotes a letter to the American Journal of Human Genetics in which several scientists argue for "a fairly recent settling of the Americas." Stewart scandalously leaves readers with the impression the letter must confirm a Book of Mormon time frame. What Stewart neglects to reveal is that the scientists in their letter state that DNA evidence "precludes a time of entry [into the Americas] greater than 20,000 years BP" in favor of a period "closer to 15,00-18,000 years BP" (Mark Seielstad, et al., "A Novel Y-Chromosome Variant," AJHG 73:3). While Stewart argues for a "recent" peopling of the Americas (apparently 2,600 BP), he adds—only to discredit scientific dating: "Recent archaeological finds in South America that appear to be older than those in North America have led some scholars to champion the Pacific colonization theory." The dates are apparently both younger and older than the scientists maintain. It goes to show that Stewart is smarter than the so-called experts, who don't know much of anything—a complaint one often hears from FARMS.

Dr. Stewart responds on his website:

I appreciate Signature Books and Dr. Southerton once again unwittingly demonstrating the unsupportable nature of their claims, their continued unscholarly denial of genetic possibilities consistent with the Book of Mormon story, and their inability to refute criticisms of their work by competent scholarship.

Further claims by Stewart:

The Ten Tribes:
Nowhere do I state that “modern Asians are Israelites.” ... (three paragraphs later Stewart states) If one accepts the Biblical history of the captivity of the Ten Tribes as a historical event – one attested to in contemporary Assyrian records – and the scriptural history of the ten tribes being dispersed to the “lands of the north,” it is virtually inevitable that almost every individual in Asia is a descendant of the “lost ten tribes” of Israel.

Mathematical models have presented evidence that the most recent common ancestor of Europeans lived as recently as one thousand years ago. [see Rohde DLT, Olson S, Chang JT (2004), "Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans," Nature 431: 562-566.] Rhode [2005] estimated that all living humans are descended from an ancestor living as recently as the first to second millennium B.C.

Patriarchal Blessings:
Any individual who interviews returned missionaries and members from the areas cited can corroborate as much. Lineages from all 13 Israelite tribes (Joseph is a double tribe) were identified among 57 patriarchal blessings given to Siberian Latter-day Saints in 2005 and 2006.

Dating the Migrations:
The Signature author does not adequately represent the scientific data that he cites. More careful reading of Seielstad’s charts (including the confidence intervals, or 2 standard deviations) demonstrate that Seielstad considers dates as recent as 5400 years ago for the settling of the Americas, even before taking error margins into consideration, or new data suggesting more rapid mutation rates. ... Nor in fact does the Book of Mormon suggest that the Lehites were the first group in the Americas.

New Data on Genetic Dating:
Evidence for my dating arguments has only increased since the article was published.

I stand by my article as written.

For scholarship on this topic, see Southerton's responses to critics, "Answers to Apologetic Claims about the Book of Mormon," and a response to Ryan Parr