For over a century, the vast majority of scholars and scientists have been satisfied that Native Americans and Pacific Islanders share a common ancestry. But it is not in Israel. The academic world has accumulated a comprehensive library of work that links each of these groups with an ancient homeland in Asia. Most scholars now accept that the ancestors of the American Indians began migrating to the Americas from somewhere in the vicinity of southern Siberia, across an icy Bering Strait, over 14,000 years ago. Similarly convincing are the signs that the early colonizers of the Pacific Isles began emerging from Southeast Asia about 30,000 years ago. The most recent of these migrations, within the last 3,000 years, resulted in the colonization of the vast expanse of Polynesia.

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While its claims may appear extraordinary today, the Book of Mormon narrative mirrors the myths that permeated the society from which the church emerged. Most American colonists held to a very literal interpretation of the Bible, including the idea that there was a rapid colonization of the earth after the Flood in 2500 BC. The most widely accepted explanation for the origin of the so-called Red Man in the New World was that they were a degraded descendant of the scattered House of Israel. Indians were blamed for having annihilated another race that was believed to have been responsible for the construction of the elaborate buildings and cultural artifacts that American colonists uncovered as they advanced westward over the Appalachian Mountains. This other race was assumed to have been light-skinned.

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Molecular genealogists are now constructing DNA family trees of paternal and maternal ancestors and tracking the earliest human migrations around the world. These family trees have been particularly informative in such places as the New World and Polynesia, which are among the most recent areas colonized by humans. Molecular genealogy has allowed us to follow the footsteps of our ancestors, following the pathways of their genes, as they multiplied and replenished throughout every corner of the earth unto the isles of the sea.

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Decades of serious and honest scholarship have failed to uncover credible evidence that these Book of Mormon civilizations ever existed. No Semitic languages, no Israelites speaking these languages, no wheeled Chariots or horses to pull them, no swords or steel to make them. They remain a great civilization vanished without a trace, the people along with their genes.

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Most LDS apologists now accept that Native Americans are principally descended from Siberian ancestors who migrated across the Bering Strait thousands of years before Lehi arrived and that the descendants of Lehi made up an infinitesimally smaller proportion of the New World populations. However, this change in perspective has not been granted the church's blessing in any official way. The general membership would not believe that Lehi's descendants could have made such a minimal impact in the Americas. In fact, millions of Mormons consider Lehi to be the father of the New World and believe that he stands at the head of their own family pedigrees. Despite decades of work by apologists, their work has yet to be discussed openly in the various public forums the church sponsors.

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There is the further problem for apologists that in trying to rescue the Book of Mormon from science, they have had to reject the clear pronouncements of every church president from Joseph Smith to the present. While apologists have long accepted the fact that other groups outside of the Book of Mormon record made their way to the New World, few apologists would have predicted that the Lamanite influence would be virtually undetectable. The accumulating DNA data have provided the first quantitative measure of an Israelite presence in the New World gene pool, and it is slim to none. The apologists are unable to find an Israelite genetic signature in the Pacific, the Americas, or in the more limited territories of Central America and Mesoamerica outside of what can be explained by recent migration. So they have chosen instead to reinterpret the meaning of statements by modern prophets.

Acceptance of the molecular evidence creates further problems for Latter-day Saints. Anyone reading the responses coming from LDS biologists will discover that they have not quibbled with the evidence for the colonization of the Americas over 13,000 years ago, for the occupation of Asia and Australia roughly 60,000 years ago, and for the emergence of humans in Africa over 100,000 years ago. Church members who were initially only curious about the Israelite DNA issue are confronted by challenges to other closely held beliefs such as the placement of Adam and Eve on the earth and a post-Flood colonization, events that most Mormons believe occurred within the last six thousand years. LDS doctrine clearly states that Adam and Eve lived in the vicinity of Independence, Missouri, despite abundant evidence that all of the earliest members of the human family dwelt in sub-Saharan Africa. LDS apologists need to explain how Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans and many other native groups have lived continuously on separate hemispheres for tens of thousands of years unperturbed by a global deluge.

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It seems that among the obstacles facing the church, the real stumbling block is not the failure to find evidence for horses, metallurgy, or the wheel in the New World, or the fact that there is no evidence for a Hebrew influence in Mesoamerica, or the preponderance of Asian DNA among living Native Americans and Polynesians.