What Does DNA Say About Book of Mormon Peoples? Genetic Evidence Explained

LDS Perspective

The Church's official position, set out in the Gospel Topics essay "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" (2016), is that DNA studies cannot be used decisively either to affirm or to reject the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The Church affirms the Book of Mormon as sacred scripture comparable to the Bible, a record of God's dealings with three groups who migrated from the Near East to the Americas hundreds of years before Europeans arrived. Its primary purpose is spiritual rather than historical, though Latter-day Saints hold its history to be real. The essay acknowledges that the evidence gathered so far suggests most Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA, and that scientists theorize a small group migrated from northeast Asia across the Siberia-Alaska land bridge in an era

Historical Perspective

Population-genetic studies of Native American DNA point to a predominantly Asian origin via Beringia, with no detectable signal of Near Eastern or ancient Israelite ancestry. Indigenous populations in the Americas carry mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups A, B, C, D, and (less commonly) X, and Y-chromosome lineages mainly in haplogroups Q and C. These trace to Siberian and East Asian source populations, with divergence from them beginning roughly 15,000-25,000 years ago. Ancient DNA has reinforced this picture, including the Anzick-1 genome from a Montana burial about 12,600 years old (Rasmussen et al., 2014) and the broader continental analyses of Reich et al. (2012) and Raghavan et al. (2015). Researchers such as Michael Crawford, Thomas Murphy, and the former LDS biologist Simon South