I read many articles, papers and books, some of them are rigorous science, others are more informal, like blogs or news sites, and others are clearly religious, like the one I will mention today.
I am an atheist. A former Anglican, I turned agnostic and later became a full atheist, but I understand the deep religious need that human beings have, so, as long as religions don't try to impose their beliefs on me (or impose religion as facts -like creationists are trying to do in the U.S.), each and everyone can believe in whatever makes them feel better. Religon plays an important role in people's lives, it brings calm, peace, and soothes in the face of death and tragic events. I have visited many holy sites of different religions, past, and present, around the globe, from China, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Rome, Vatican, Western Europe, the Americas, and I have to admit that holy sites have a mystical aura about them. Having said this, It is clear that I don't support Mormon beliefs, but those who follow that faith, try to find scientific backing to prove some of its basic premises. In this context, the book Is Decrypting the Genetic Legacy of America’s Indigenous Populations Key to the Historicity of the Book of Mormon? by Ugo A. Perego and Jayne E. Ekinsipsum puts forward some interesting thoughts and hypothesis that are backed by science and stand outside of the "orthodox" viepoint on Amerindian genetics. Below is a short quote from this work (p. 276 and 278).
What would have happened to their DNA after their arrival? A well considered argument comes from Henry C. Harpending, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. When asked, “If a group of, say, fifty Phoenicians (men and women) arrived in the Americas some 2,600 years ago and intermarried with indigenous people, and assuming their descendants fared as well as the larger population through the vicissitudes of disease, famine, and war, would you expect to find genetic evidence of their Phoenician ancestors in the current Native American population? In addition, would their descendants be presumed to have an equal or unequal number of Middle Eastern as Native American haplotypes?
Professor Harpending’s reply was, “I doubt that we would pick up [evidence of the Phoenicians] today at all, but it does depend on how they intermixed once they were here. If they intermixed freely and widely, and if there were several millions of people here in the New World, then the only trace would be an occasional strange stray haplotype. Even if we found such a haplotype we would probably assume it was the result of post-Columbian admixture.”40
... From a numerical point of view, the arrival of Lehi and his group would be comparable to a drop of ink in a swimming pool. However, in the swimming pool, although nearly impossible to detect, the actual drop of ink is present. The difficulty in recognizing the drop of ink is determined by the availability of instruments sufficiently sensitive to detect its minuscule presence within the much larger body of water. This analogy does not extend perfectly to DNA and inheritance at the population level. Although the group of Old World migrants was small (a drop of ink), the DNA may have survived (or not) to the present time — due to the forces of genetic drift. If it disappeared, it would be as if someone removed the drop of ink from the swimming pool such that it seemed never to have been there in the first place. Of course, this would be heavily dependent on the level of isolation the Book of Mormon party experienced — something not clearly stated in the narrative."
40 Signature Books, http://signaturebooks.com/2010/06/dna-and-thebook-of-mormon (accessed 5 January 2013).
So, small parties if they admixed, would be so diluted that nothing would remain to show they arrived. Perego and Ekinsipsum also mention the "Great Dying" and clearly describe how it contributed to wiping out lineages and leaving no trace of them. This is something I have mentioned many times in this blog (see p. 281, quoted below).
"The arrival of Europeans to the Americas in the fifteenth century was orders of magnitude worse than the combined effect of the Black Plague and the Spanish Influenza on Europeans. The consequences of rapidly reduced population and displacement has forever altered the demographic landscape of pre-Columbian America such that scientists from many disciplines are considerably limited in their ability to draw conclusions about the history, including the genetic history, of the New World. To model such an event, suppose that after an epidemic of smallpox, a hypothetical village of a thousand individuals experienced a ninety percent reduction; the one hundred surviving subjects may or may not include at least one representative of all the original group genetic lineages. Although survival of many diseases also involves a genetic component, Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variance have little known or no influence at all on the immunity of an individual affected by one of the several diseases Europeans brought to the New World.
With selection playing little or no recognizable role on specific ancestral lines, the drastic population reduction in the hypothetical village inevitably would have affected the number of surviving genetic lineages. Of course, the initial impact with Europeans was so severe that entire tribal groups, particularly on the Atlantic side of the Americas, were completely decimated, leaving no genetic trace of their existence. Native Y chromosomes were quickly replaced by those from the Old World, and mitochondrial DNA variation was greatly reduced."
Interestingly it also addresses the issue of European-like or African-like genes in America, they are always attributed to Post-Columbian events: "If mtDNA lineages are observed in the Americas, even in tribal groups considered deeply indigenous who belong to mtDNA groups known to be African, European, or even Asian, the argument most readily given is that they have been introduced more recently, after the rediscovery of the New World by Europeans" (p.269) and "Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by scientists is to be able to assign clearly and unequivocally any European or African lineage found in the Americas to the pre-Columbian era. The generalized view among population geneticists is that after the initial arrival of Paleo-Indians toward the end of the Last Ice Age, no other migrations took place until the discovery of the double-continent by Europeans in 1492... the common consensus, whenever any DNA is found that does not fit with the classic Native America genetic types, is an automatic assignment of such DNA to the post-Columbian migration wave of European or African migrants." (p. 271-272)
About Lehi and America
For the non-Mormons, the group mentioned in this work as accompanying Lehi were Jews, who were inspired and led by Lehi's father, Nephi, a Hebrew prophet who guided his family and friends from Jerusalem to the land that the Lord promised them in the west (America). This took place c.600 BC when the Babylonians struck Jerusalem. Lehi and his sons built a ship and sailed across the ocean to America, and settled there.
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