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THE FINLAND QUID

This will give you something to chew on.  A student volunteer digging at a Neolithic site in western Finland found a hunk, or Quid, of birch-bark tar [resin]—5,000 year old chewing gum, complete with tooth marks. (Patel p. 9) Quids are now being looked for in excavations all over the world. The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, follows the Mesolithic period known as the Old Stone Age, a period defined by the use of chipped stone artifacts in contrast to the polished stone tools of the Neolithic. (Mellaart pp. 9-10) The terms are widely used in Asian, European, and African prehistory, but refers to different chronological periods in different areas.  One of the earliest Neolithic society appears 9000 BC, a site in Turkey called Catalhoyuk (www.secondlife.com), where they are still excavating. In some instances the appearance of farming identifies the Neolithic period, several thousands years later.  When copper or copper-bronze tools appear, the successor society is called Chalcolithic or Bronze Age.  In the many books and articles discussing tablets found in Mesopotamian areas these distinctions are dated more exactly. (Whitehouse p. 350)  

The student find in Finland would be dated near the end of the Neolithic for that area. The quid of chewing gum or sap, much like westerners use pine sap or resin for chewing gum, was like their western counterparts also used for glue, or water proofing baskets and water containers;  the early southwestern cultures such as the Basketmakers used pine resin to water proof baskets. One such basket, crafted by the Navajo, beautifully prepared inside and out, adorns my mantel, patterned after a basket that provided forensic evidence left behind by Navajo raiders when they looted and sacked the pueblo villages of Rosa and Galena 900 to 950 AD in western Colorado, when they made their first excursion into the southwest sending a shock wave through all the pueblo societies clear to the Colorado River, but not beyond. This so disturbed the pueblo societies that they took up defensive positions and construction. The birch-bark tar or resin may have been used to treat mouth infections and prevent tooth decay. (Patel p. 10)

THE SOUTHWEST QUID

Researchers in the southwest are using another masticated substance to help understand the migrations of ancient Native Americans. Native American Quids-of yucca or cornstalk fibers that were chewed like gum or tobacco-are well preserved in the arid American Southwest. Researchers pulled from these quids mitochondrial DNA (which comes from the mothers only), more than 2,000 years old DNA providing an important alternative to the controversial sampling of Native American remains.  Early analysis suggests the Basketmaker II culture from which the Quids were obtained was descended from farmers who migrated north from Mexico! (Patel p. 10)  That find has put a lot of people on notice.

To understand these Southwest Quid chewers, it might be essential to provide a short review of the cultural sequences for the American Southwest, especially the Pueblo, also called Anasazi, cultures, because of their clear  connection to the Book of Mormon. What follows is a brief summary of the cultural sequence beginning with the earliest, called Basketmaker 1, and ending with the Anasazi cultures today known as the Cliff Dwellers and Puebloans. Notice that Basketmaker I may extend from 1500 BC to about the time of Christ.  It is not clearly defined, it may eventually be divided into early and late periods itself. In part this culture may overlap the Jaredite and Nephite areas as they spread out over the land and different times. The Quid mentioned above comes from what they identify as Basketmaker 11, roughly starting at about the time of Christ.

The dating of sites near Yuma, Arizona along the Colorado River, for those moving northward out of Mexico start at about 10 AD. A future study will describe the migrations of the Anasazi which will give more details of their migration out of southern Mexico and Guatemala based on their own records.     

BASKETMAKER I (EARLY) 1500 BC 50 AD.

Long-term seasonal use of caves for camping, storage, burial, rock art. Camp and limited activity sites in open. San Juan Anthropomorphic-style pictographs and petroglyps. No pottery, Atlatl and dart; large corner- or side notched projectile points. Elaborate, coiled and twined basketry. Corn and squash grown, but no beans, cultivation primarily floodplain or runoff based. Hunting gathering probably important, population density low relative to later periods, but higher than Archaic. There are very few of these sites found.  Just enough to know they are there.

BASKETMAKER 11 ((LATE) AD 50-500

This is the cultural group to which those doing the DNA studies have ascribed the Quids to have been generated.  Habitations are shallow pit-houses plus separate storage pits or cists; dispersed settlement with small, low-density villages in some areas, caves and campsites important as well.  I found an off-gray thin ceramic ware that seems to appear at this time, found in sites I have mapped south of Snake Canyon in the Kaibab Forest north of the Grand Canyon. Kaibab archaeologists think there are many sites of this period in the Kaibab, which is a very large area. Near the site we found there are ruins of Pueblo 1, Pueblo 11 and Pueblo 111, suggesting the inhabitants were there for nearly 1300 years. One of these was a beautiful large Pueblo 111 village. Atlatl and darts are principal weapons, but in a site dated 200 AD on an island in Lake Powell, a bow and arrow were found. While not widely used, the bow does seem to have been available, and may have been used in earlier times. The Book of Mormon refers to Nephi and his wood and steel bows 590 BC. (l Ne 16:18, 23) Earlier Mesopotamians and people of the Levant, or Israel, had the bow centuries earlier. Reliance on maize and squash agriculture, but beans not grown. Upland dry farming in addition to floodplain farming. 

Scouts would be sent out. They would look for sage brush hip high, which would indicate soil knee deep. They would plant all the seeds in a single hole nine inches deep, fill with water, heap sand another nine inches over it, wet the pile down, and then would not need to water again. A rain fall of more than 7-9 inches would permit a crop to be harvested. They would plant 15 days after the vernal equinox.  On the Virgin River across from Littlefield, Arizona, I personally mapped a Basketmaker 11 site with thin vertical plates of shale and sandstone marking the cist, nearby was pit houses of Basketmaker 111, and a Pueblo 1 structure, near by there was Pueblo 11 structures. The site had been occupied or utilized for nearly 1150 years.  I personally mapped, with my brother, 1300 Pueblo 1 and Pueblo 11 sites and an additional 400 Pueblo 111 sites in the Kaibab Forest and the Saddle Mt. Wilderness Area, north of the Grand Canyon, and in all this area there were only few Basketmaker sites; several were in the Jump Canyon area suggesting they had arrived in the area through a river corridor up Kanab Creek which flowed south into the Colorado River.      

BASKETMAKER 111   AD 500-750

Habitations are deep pit-houses, often with antechambers, and with separate storage pits, cists, or small jacal surface structure. Dispersed settlement with occasional small villages and occasional great kivas. Plain gray pottery, small frequencies of black and white. Bow and arrow replace atlatl. Beans added to cultigens, added to the hole with other seeds. Squash, melons, corn and beans were put in one hole. Some sites we may have mapped early on as Pueblo l sites because of the presence of early gray ware and black on white varieties were probably Basketmaker 111 sites.  We found new sites among old ones excavated and mapped earlier in Grand Gulch and Beef Basin and related areas of Utah. 

PUEBLO 1    AD 750-900

Small to large villages in some areas, 12 to 70 rooms, dispersed settlement in others. Habitation units of “protokivas” pit structure with vent shaft, plus surface room block of storage and living rooms; Jacal or crude masonry construction. Great Kivas present in many communities. Plain and neck-banded gray pottery, abundant with low frequencies of black and white and decorated red and orange ware. Notched pebble axes common. Bow present.  About 15 % of the villages we found and mapped on the Kaibab were Pueblo 1 (P-1) sites.

PUEBLO 11:  AD 900-1150

Chacoan florescence: “great houses” elaborate great kivas, roads, etc., in many but not all regions; strong differences between great houses and surrounding “unit pueblos” composed of masonry lined kivas and surface masonry room blocks. Diagnostic for the period is corrugated gray and elaborate black-and –white pottery widespread plus decorated red or orange types in some areas. Whenever we found corrugated ware we knew we were in a Pueblo 11 (P-11) site, if along with it there were polychrome pottery shards we knew the site also was occupied during Pueblo 111 times. This was a period of maximum northern and western extent of Pueblo cultures in Four Corners area. Most of the ruins in the Kaibab and Saddle Mountain Wilderness are Pueblo 11 structures. From Welcome Creek, north of Beaver Dam and Littlefield, in Arizona, we mapped 65 villages from there to the waters of Lake Mead. Most of them were Pueblo 11 sites, the largest was a 120 room village.   

In 1858 Brigham Young initiated the White Mountain Expedition to look for a sanctuary for the saints if they needed one during the Johnson War. The Basin and Range territory between the Humboldt Trail and the Spanish Trail was a big question Mark, a partial traverse had been made in 1824 by Mountain Men, and Carson and Fremont had circled the Basin in 1844, but what was in the central area was unknown. A vast white mountain had been reported there. Mormons had settled in Genoa, Nevada in 1852, but they had not gone through the Basin and Range territory to get there. In March-April of any year,  snow covers the mountain ranges of the west side of the Ruby Range and extending northward from there, and viewed from the highway west of  Spruce Mountain they seem connected to ranges slightly off-set, giving the appearance is of one great elongated white  Mountain range. But they are off-set and disconnected. And the elevations of the valleys were to high for what Brigham had in mind.

One of the groups involved in the expedition encountered Paiute Indians at Bullwacker Summit, 30 miles south, in the Egan Range, of what is now Ely, Nevada. The explorers had frequently seen broken pottery and they questioned the Indians, who did not make pottery, or very little of it, and the Paiutes “informed Bean [heading that group] that all such, as making pottery, mounds, inscriptions on rocks, and the like, were done by the Tribe of Moquis. (Hopis, the Hopis had changed their name from Moqui to Hopi, meaning ‘the People’, in 1800), in ages past.” (Stott p. 170) That information took us to that summit and sites west of there where we found sites with abundant P-l  pottery. Then, along North Creek east of Bullwacker Summit, we found and mapped a Pueblo 1 village that was 1100 feet long of continuous rooms and cists one of the largest we had ever found. Corn cobs in the area indicated they had corn fields nearby at that time, fed by North Creek. Many sites were also found at the head of Murry Summit, the south edge of Ely, Nevada, with Shoshone and P-1 ceramic wares. The western most sites of P-l we have found were on Nine Mile Peak, 25 miles south of Eureka, Nevada where the rooms and cists were accompanied by gray and black-on white pottery; near by in the area were many cists of Shoshone with diagnostic thick white ware, and some Paiute diagnostic brown ware showing the incised markings made by fingernails, characteristic of their pottery. In the Pony Springs area of eastern Nevada we also found P-1 sites, one site seemed peculiar, it had black on white P-1 ceramic pieces, the thick white pottery of the Shoshone, and the thick incised brown ware of the Paiutes. On one site it seemed that an Anasazi family with two sons, one married to a Shoshone and the other to a Paiute woman, each with their ceramic ware,  made up the campers at that station; no doubt traders, freely moving across the cultural lines of both tribes. They were apparently all engaged in hunting- gathering and trading in that area without any hostilities.

Abundant obsidian present at the various sites can be eventually dated and their sources determined. During the past winter another volcanic source was located while on a field trip with my oldest son and grandson near Barkley, Nevada. We continue to work in the field and continue to find volcanic sources of obsidian and many sites and tracking out the expansion of various Cultures in the western states. We have found and mapped more than 125 such sources, reports in preparation will be given to the BLM in the Beaver District, Utah.

PUEBLO 111   AD 1150-1350

Large Pueblos, often of more than 100 rooms, ‘revisionist great houses’ in some areas. Dispersed pattern in others; high kiva to room ratios. Cliff dwellings, towers, common in some areas, defense construction and location. Diagnostic three colored, polychrome, pottery, red-orange-black most common, glazed black on white, Corrugated gray and elaborate black and –white pottery, widespread, plus decorated red or orange pottery in some areas. Grooved axes common. At one beautiful P-111 village we found a small ceremonial pot about 2 and 1/2   inches high and diameter, that hung from an officials neck and in it was sand, plant pollen, including corn pollen, the corn pollen was the largest the expert doing the analysis had seen of domesticated corn pollen. At several sites we were able to take pollen samples through washed out areas showing the change in corn and other vegetation through P-1 to P-11 times.  Abandonment of the Four Corners by 1300 AD populations increased to the south in the great Anasazi pueblos of the Rio Grande, Hopi, Zuni and Mogollon Rim areas. We mapped some 400 of these P-111 sites in the north Kaibab Forest and Saddle Mountain wilderness areas. Villages were often circular or crescent shape. Few archaeologists had assumed there was a Pueblo 111 presence north of the Grand Canyon, but the sites we found and mapped there, and north of Snake Gulch and around Mt. Trumball prove otherwise. About the time this period closed, for religious reasons, it seems all of the population departed and joined with the Hopis on the east side of the Colorado River in the present 13 great pueblos and finger mesas of that Indian Nation..

The Pueblo cultures now to be described do not occur in the Kaibab Forest or Kanab or Saddle Mountain Wilderness areas, or least we have not found them yet.

PUEBLO IV   AD 1350-1600

Large, plaza-oriented pueblos in Rio Grande and western Pueblo areas; low kiva-to-room ratios. Kachina cult wide-spread. Corrugated pottery replaced by plan utility types; black and white decline relative to red, orange, or yellow types. Area occupied by Puebloans continues to shrink as Mogollon rim abandoned. Many present-day Pueblo groups are identified in this period. The Athabaskans (Apache-Navajo) raiders and predatory Indians entered the Four Corners area as they move east after entering from western Colorado. They had reached the Colorado River at Navajo Mt. by 1280 AD.  By 1850 one of their main headquarters was at Canyon de Chelle and Canyon Del Muerto, near Chinle, Arizona. In these two canyons some 8,000 of them were trapped by Kit Carson and forced on a horrible march that killed many of them to Bosque Rodondo. After great suffering they were finally permitted to return to their canyons.  Third and fourth generations Navajos remember this episode in their history with grave misgivings.

PUEBLO V   AD 1600-PRESENT

Puebloans adapt to Spanish presence in 17th and 18th centuries, to Anglo-Americans in 19th and 20th centuries. Population declines initially owing to European diseases. Spanish oppression, raiding by horse-mounted nomadic Indians, Pueblos incorporate many elements of European material and economic culture but tenaciously preserve languages, religion, aspects of social organization, and subsistence. The Navajos expand into much of southern Four Corners. Their reservations becomes one of the largest in the United States, and they represent today about one sixth of all of the Native Americans. Indian craft arts revive and expand in response to tourism and market demand in 20th century.

THE ANCIENT MOQUI, NOW THE MODERN HOPI

The southwestern Indian presence represented by the nine culture groups described above  were one people, they originally settled the country and lived there developing changing phases of culture as they adapted to the environment and exploited it more fully. Today they are best represented by the Hopi and Zuni. The name HOPI means the ‘PEOPLE’. Each year the Hopi recount their travels from Guatemala to their present area in the many Mesa areas. Major villages along the way are mentioned in their annual oral recounting. Details of this will be the subject of a future web site entry. What is important is that the Hopi also have a unique tradition which they recount. Their ancestors “did lay down their weapons of war and buried them and did not fight against the Great Spirit any more.” [See Alma 23:7]  The Hopis say that “Their tradition of being a little people of peace began some time before the Great Star appeared in the sky. [See 3 Ne 1:21] Their conversion to the peaceful way was signified by an oath of burying their weapons of war deep in the earth. After burying their weapons, they faced there enemies, but would not take up weapons to fight against them. Rather than do this, they would gladly die and many of them were killed. This made their enemies ashamed and some of their aggressor would join the peaceful Hopi and bury their weapons also.” (Cryer p. 96) “The boys are also given arrows. The arrows have been sawed off and are blunt because the Hopi buried their weapons of war deep in the earth before the ‘Great Star’ [See Hel 14:5; 3 Ne 1:21] appeared in the sky, and a ‘true Hopi’ must never take up weapons of war to fight again.”  (Cryer p. 96) These stories are familiar to any LDS who has read the book of Mormon.

How could this be if the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction?  People of great intellect miss some of these extremely important little details buried in the wondrous Book of Mormon.

THE ANASAZI STORIES OF ORIGIN

The cultures, Basketmaker 11 through to the modern pueblos, but especially the Cliff Dwelling cultures, were given the Navajo name of Anasazi, which means ‘Ancient Enemy Ancestors’, referring to a time when there was great hostilities between the peoples. This seems to reflect a great deal of the content of the Book of Mormon. Donald G. Pike in his excellent book on the Anasazi writes: “Where these ancient Ones came from poses a moot question both to scholarly archaeologists and anthropologists, and to forthright mythicists like myself. The former adhere to the theory of an influx of people from Asia to America by way of the Bering Strait about 15,000 years ago. Gradually these immigrants spread southward throughout the length of the continent, forming pools of primitive culture. One of them was the Cochise, or Desert Culture in our Southwest from which the Basket Makers or [early] Anasazi of the San Juan drainage are possibly derived about the time of Christ. A thousand or more year later, culminating with the great drought in the thirteenth century, the Anasazi Pueblo people abandoned their homelands in the Four Corners area and migrated south and east to establish themselves in the pueblos of the Hopi and Zuni, and those along the Rio Grande.” (Pike p. 12-13) We Don’t agree with all that is included in this summary.  New data is modifying much of it.

 “Hopi myth [oral history] on the contrary, recounts that the Hopis crossed the sea during their emergence to this present Fourth World, arriving somewhere on the western coast of Mexico or Central America. They then gradually worked northward to settle in their present homeland in the Four Corners region. The validity of this myth [oral history] is attested in many ways; the dramatic reenactment of their migratory journey in numerous ceremonials, the many place names of their identified settlements along the way, and the similarity of their rituals to those of the highly civilized peoples of ancient Mesoamerica.” (Pike p.13)   Could the Hopi and the preceding cultures be related to the 5400 men and their women and children who departed about 50 BC, 30 years after the burial of weapons by those mentioned in Helaman? (See Alma 63:4)  The timing was right. Assuming this to be true, we have used that information to guide us in exploration up the Colorado River, and its adjacent tributaries, the Virgin, Santa Clara, Muddy River and San Juan, with tremendous success. We defy any one who wants to try to otherwise explain why we have in some 12 years of archaeological exploration mapped some 6500 sites and still counting based on our knowledge of that account.  

THE ESKIMOS AND OBSIDIAN

The AB blood groups of the Eskimos, Anuits, Copper Eskimos and Inuits from the Aleutians to Greenland represent migrations of peoples out of Siberia. “A recent study investigating mtDNA subclade distributions across Siberia recognize two subclades of haplogroups D2, one among central Siberian groups (D2a) and the other among Chukchi, Siberian Eskimos, and Aleuts (D2b) These subclades share a coalescent date of 8 to 6 ka [8 to 6,000 years ago] which suggests that middle Holocene ancestors of modern Eskimo-Aleuts spread from Siberia into the Bering Sea region and not vice versa.” (Goebel, et al,  p. 1497) But these groups did not go south they are still in the northlands. Their blood groups are not mixed to any great extent with those of the southern tribes or the Athabascans in western Canada, or the Apache or Navajo, or any other of the 625 tribes of the Americas.  This has been discussed in Erickson DNA AND THE BOOK OF MORMON-PART 1, 10 May 2006 (And will be discussed in more detail in PART 3)

My brother and other members of my family have worked with obsidian and catalogued more than 6500 Indian sites in six states, and mapped more than 120 volcanic and other obsidian sources, to enable us to identify trade lanes and corridors through which obsidian was transported in the southwest, prepared and chipped into pre-forms for trade, establishing the trade lanes and their use of obsidian in the southwest. After a human chips a piece of obsidian to make a point the chipped surface begins to hydrate and it take about 625 years,  depending on local factors of climate, the general rule of thumb, in order to hydrate a one micron thickness, so obsidian can be dated as to when it was chipped and utilized. They are useful also in determining animals, even humans, they have been used to kill. Obsidian points found on sites in Alaska that date thousands of years ago were given the forensic treatment and preserved blood cells were extracted from the points and identified modern bison (Bison bison),  Dall Sheep,  (Ovis dalli) and mammoth (Mammoth primigenius), as well as others. (Dixon pp. 74-76)

Using a ratio of rubidium-iron-strontium with a few other elements permits one to fingerprint the piece of obsidian and determine its volcanic source. So obsidian is one of the most useful products found in Indian sites.

In Alaska there is the Batza Tena obsidian locality in northwest Alaska which was utilized as a source of obsidian as early as 11,700 years BP (before the present, or 9,700 year BC), with obsidian distributed as far as the Tanana Valley at that time. Obsidian from the Wrangell Mountains also occurs in the lowest cultural layers at Broken Mammoth site as well as in sites at Walker Road, indicating widespread distribution networks throughout all of central Alaska by 11,700 yrs BP. (Again, 9,700 BC) If older archaeological sites are present, at least in central Alaska, they may be discovered during the course of new field work being done. Goebel, et al, are working to change this information. (Goebel p. 1498) As yet, the foot hills and coastal plains north of the Brooks Range show no unassailable evidence for human occupation older than about 10,500 B.P. (8,500 BC) The well known Mesa site and other hunting lookouts in the Arctic Foothills were occupied by Paleo-Indian about 10,500 B.P. (8,500 BC) There are older sites in Wyoming than these, and others elsewhere in the Americas. Obsidian from Siberian sources has not as yet been reported in the Americas. Even Kamchatkan sites are not much older than 11000 B.P.  In western Beringia on the Siberian side, there are sites dating to 14,000 years B.P.  There are enigmatic sites such as Akmak and Onion Portage in northwest Alaska, but no dates are available. (Bonnichen pp. 184-185)

A total of 4,630,000 lithic artifacts were recovered up to 2006 from the Shirataki Sites in  Hokkaido, Japan, 99 % of them were obsidian. (Suziki p. 31)  The oldest pottery in Japan date from 11,400 to 16,000 years B.P. (Taniguichi p. 33) But no obsidian nor pottery from these sources have as yet been reported in the Americas except in the instance of some Jarmo pottery probably from a shipwrecked Japanese boat on the west side of Central America. Archaeologists, as yet, are unable at this point to prove that any Paleo-Indian, other than the Eskimo groups, which are still there, and they came much more recently, ever went south. There are older sites in Japan and Siberian areas, which lead to speculation, and evidence may yet be found in support, but they do not shed light on any migrations across the Beringia Bridge when it was open for migration, if it ever was that open. Some archaeologists are thinking that the ancient Americans came from Europe during Solutrean times, and moved across America and to the northwest rather than the other way around. Goebel disagrees with this idea. But a lot of new work is in progress in northeast America looking for such evidence.   

The debate continues and students of these problems are earnestly seeking answers to this debate.  The general tendency is that as more scientific data becomes available, the more valid becomes the Book of Mormon presentations of the migrations and histories of peoples in the Americas.  Each new discovery seems benefit the Book of Mormon.

THE SPECULATION-THE THEORIES

Texas A&M University has for some years published an annual review of discoveries of early sites in the Americas including Latin America. The current volume, Current Research in the Pleistocene, No. 24, for 2007 is now available. Sites dating to about 10,000 BC are generally placed in the Holocene, earlier sites are considered Pleistocene and are called Paleolithic. Any text book on geology can give you the chronological layout used by field students. The Texas A&M publication has been reporting for some years discoveries in the Americas considerably older than the Beringia region, so much so that critical archaeologists are looking for sources other than the Beringia-Siberian region for migrations into the Americas. Siberian archaeologists speculate that the most favorable conditions for peopling the Americas occurred during an interval 70,000 to 60,000 years ago, another at 50,000 to 19,000 years ago, and the most likely was 15,000 to 14.000 years ago. (Derevv’anko p. 351) But to date, evidence for any of these have as yet to be found in Alaska where the corridors were supposed to be open. The Eskimo migrations came even much later but before  4,000 BC.  All of these occurred much earlier than the Jaredite migration of about 2300 BC, and the Nephite arrival at 598 BC, and the Mulekite arrival a few decades after that. The Paiutes of Nevada who have a language akin to the Uto-Aztecan of the Shoshone, Comanche and Aztec, record in their oral history that they killed the occupants of Nevada when they arrived in western Nevada about 500 BC.  Were these scattered Jaredites or earlier inhabitants of Nevada?  The Kennwick and Spirit Cave discoveries indicate something primitive was in the northwest and Nevada about 8500 BC, but no definitive conclusions are yet available as to what these finds mean. Most people are not students of the facts, they are given to instant analysis and opinion-hurling, functioning to create barriers which time is overcoming. (Dillehay pp. 2-5)  I was studying sites in the Yucatan when Dilehay’s discoveries were finally given the recognition they disserved.  Similar discoveries made in Peru by MacNeish and his team are often ignored. (MacNeish p. 54) But to ignore the Book of Mormon is to do so at the peril of ones intellectual integrity.

So, there is considerable evidence for a presence of occupants in the Americas before the Jaredites and Nephites, and the preface to the Book of Mormon accommodates that knowledge. But how do you classify any human like forms before 4,000 BC?  As the Book of Abraham emphatically states, Adam is the first man on this earth, and he is the First Born of all men, (Abraham 1:3) and Eve is the First women. (Moses 4::26)  It is best to start from there, and carefully evaluate all other claims. Any man like forms earlier than Adam and Eve did not have a nurturing period in the Spirit world with a Heavenly mother and father. The ancient central Americans taught: “thou wert made in the place where are the great God and Goddess which are above the heavens…they mother and thy father, celestial woman and celestial man, made and reared thee…thou has come to this world from afar, poor and weary.” (Sejourne p. 56)  To quote a mid-wife speaking to a newly born baby in Central America years ago.  The research is most interesting and takes one to areas that are exciting.  Who ever taught that were had a pre-existence where we were nurtured by heavenly parents?  Not one Christian church has this concept, but it is in the American Indian traditions, and in the records now being recovered from Egypt, Iran, Mesopotamia and elsewhere as my many tapes and web site articles demonstrate.    

And to compare the DNA of modern Indians groups with the three migrations the Book of Mormon detail, where would you find Jaredite DNA? Where would you find Nephite DNA? Where would you find Mulekite DNA?  Burials may be available somewhere for all three of these groups. Generalizations about DNA current in many of the publications to date do not address certain questions, and part of the exercise now is to ask the right questions.  There is a long way to go before there is adequate understanding and enough data to draw firm conclusions. But a lot of people are studying all details of the problem of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere and their origins. It will be a while before all the facts are known.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BONNICHSEN, Robson, & Karen L. Turnmmire, Ice Age Peoples of North America,Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 2005

CRYER, Tom, Visual Testamen, cc. Tom Cryer, 1999

DILEHAY, Tom D., Monte Verde, A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, Vol 2. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. 1997 

DIXON, E. James, Quest for the Origins of the First Americans, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1993

DEREV’ANKO, Anatoliy P., The Paleolithic of Siberia, New Discoveries and Interpretations, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Division, Novosibirsk, University of Illinois, Urbana, Chicago 1998

GOEBEL, Ted, Michel R. Waters, Dennis H. O’Rourke, The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas, SCIENCE, Vol. 319, 14 March 2008. This paper renders most earlier writings on this subject obsolete.  

MACNEISH, Richard S. et al. Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru, Vol. 11, Excavations and Chronology, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1981

MELLAART, James, The Neolithic of the Near East, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1975

PATEL, Samir S., Archeology,  www.archaelogy.org,  November-December 2007.

PIKE, Donald G., Anasazi, Ancient People of the Rock, American West Publishing  Company, Palo Alto California, 1974

SEJOURNE, Laurette, Burning Water, Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico, Shambhala, Berkeley, 1976

SUZUKI, Haroyuki, and Yasuo Naoe, The Shirataki Sites: An overview of Upper Paleolithic Sites at an Obsidian Source in Hokkaido, Japan, Current Research in the Pleistocene, Vol. 23, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 2006

TANIGUICHI, Yasuhiro,  Dating and Function of the Oldest Pottery in Japan, Current Research in the Pleistocene, Vol. 23, Texas A&M, University, College Station, Texas, 2006

WHITEHOUSE, Ruth, The Facts on File Dictionary of Archaeology, Facts On File Publications, New York, N.Y. 1983