The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Book of Mormon and DNA Studies
Gospel Topics Essays
The Church’s own essay is the right place to start. Founder-effect math, genetic drift, and bottleneck events erase the markers of a small family within centuries. Principal Native American lineages (A, B, C, D, X) reflect ancient Asian migrations — which the Book of Mormon never denied. The text is the story of a covenant remnant, not a population genetics textbook.
The Book of Mormon itself, however, does not claim that the peoples it describes were the only or even the predominant inhabitants of the lands they occupied.
- Lehi’s party was tiny compared with existing New World populations.
- mtDNA and Y-DNA of a few founders are expected to vanish over millennia.
- The Church does not require a hemispheric 'all Native Americans are Lamanites' model.