By Michael Vinson
And they were scattered upon much of the face of the land, and the Lamanites also. And they were exceedingly more numerous than were they of the Nephites, and they loved murder and would drink the blood of beasts. —Jarom 1:6
In this verse, Jarom is wondering aloud how the Lamanite population had so significantly surpassed that of the Nephites during a relatively short time span. According to the Book of Mormon chronology (which began with the 1920 edition under the direction of Elder James E. Talmage’s revision committee), Jarom wrote this approximately two hundred years after Lehi and his family had arrived in the new world. How did the Lamanites (who only seemed to be hunter/gatherers) beat the agricultural Nephites in the population game?
To answer this question, we first need to look at our assumptions. The major assumption is that with a such large number of the descendants of Lehi in the Americas, there should be some remnant DNA marker in Native Americans from the Middle East—but so far, none has been found. So let’s look a little closer at what “Lamanite” actually means. Popularly, it means “biological descendant of Laman or Lemuel and a principal ancestor of modern Native Americans.” This is a prevalent assumption because Joseph Smith taught that the native peoples in the Americas were descendants of Lehi; also, many revelations about American Indians in the D&C call them “Lamanites.”
The assumption that modern Native Americans are biological descendants of Lehi is based on the idea that the Americas (the ‘promised land’) were largely empty of people prior to Lehi’s family’s arrival. But “promised land” does not necessarily mean vacant land—as we have read, after their return from Egypt, the Israelites had to fight people off their promised land.
We know from archaeology and genetics that plenty of populations inhabited the Americas long before Lehi’s family arrived. The earliest archeological sites in the Americas that bear human traces are in Clovis, New Mexico (approximately 14,000 B.C.), and in Chile (13,000 B.C.). Linguistically and genetically, almost all Native Americans can be traced to Siberia and other parts of Asia, leading archeologists to the conclusion that migrants from Asia populated the Americas by the late Pleistocene Era, likely coming to the continent across the Bering Strait.
So if the Americas were actually populated for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Nephi and Lehi (even, if as it appears, they were unaware of other peoples in their new promised land) this might explain the population explosion among the Lamanites., It is entirely possible that after the famous family break-up, Laman and Lemuel and their descendents found and integrated themselves with native peoples, marrying and having children with them. Perhaps when the Nephites later encountered the Lamanite descendants (whose children would probably have acquired the native brown skin coloring), they assumed the darkened skin coloring was a curse of God.
Indeed, that seems to be what we read when Nephi attributes their darkened skins to disobedience in 2 Nephi 5:21, 23:
And he had caused the cursing to come upon them . . . wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them . . . And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed, for they shall be cursed with the same cursing.
It seems that the Nephites, whether before or after they re-encountered the descendants of Laman and Lemuel, were willing to believe that the Lord might curse these disobedient descendants in a very visible way. And considering how surprised they were at what they supposed was a Lamanite population explosion, it also seems that the Nephite worldview did not encompass the possibility of other peoples’ having inhabiting the land prior to Lehi’s arrival.
The perpetration of this Nephitish myth may make modern readers wonder how much of the information presented in the Book of Mormon is similarly uninformed and whether this should affect their testimony. A helpful approach to this problem is found in the anthropological theories of Clifford Geertz in his landmark work, The Interpretation of Cultures (Chicago, 1973). He proposes that cultural symbols, even if they lack a factual basis or are rooted in erroneous thinking, are important in coming to understand a people. In other words, a false Nephite perception (that God cursed people with dark skins, for example) is still important if the Nephites believe it is true—their perception becomes their reality and forms their worldview. With this in mind, we should read Nephi’s verse not to get an accurate view of the dynamics of Lamanite population growth, but to understand the perceptions and biases of Nephite culture.
When they rely on Nephi’s original misperception to guide their thinking about the Book of Mormon, contemporary Mormons can fall into similar thought patterns. For example, those who interpret the lack of Middle Eastern DNA in Native Americans as evidence against Book of Mormon historicity are operating under the mistaken assumption that the members of Lehi’s family were the sole inhabitants of the American continent.
Seeing how Nephite prophets could be so wrong in their assumptions motivates me to think about the assumptions of contemporary Mormonism. For example, a lot of weight has been put on the search for Middle Eastern DNA in Native American populations. Many testimonies were shaken when it wasn’t found. I believe the search for Book of Mormon proofs is a mildly disguised form of idolatry, seeking to establish the validity of the Book of Mormon with empirical evidence rather than with personal revelation.
Those who seek for external proof might rejoice if the golden plates were found. After all, wouldn’t that be the ultimate proof of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon? Not necessarily. Think about the recovery of the original papyri of the Book of Abraham and the subsequent discovery that the manuscript’s translation had nothing about Abraham in it. The assumption of those who were looking for empirical proof was that the text of the Book of Abraham would be literally on the papyrus. But now it seems that the Egyptian papyri might have instead served as a prompt for Joseph Smith to receive a revelation.
Perhaps it was the same with the golden plates—if they were subjected to scholarly translation, they might read very differently from the Book of Mormon we currently possess. Testimonies might topple in the face of such evidence unless their bearers choose to see the Book of Mormon as a revelation of faith rather than as a historical record. Such an assumption would also put to rest worries about the absence of Middle Eastern DNA among Native Americans. Elder Talmage took the first step in that direction when his Book of Mormon Revision Committee deleted every footnoted reference in the 1920 edition to Lamanites that tied them to “Indians.”
