https://www.tiktok.com/@scriptureplus/v ... aC4iqEh6gM
The Book of Mormon says horses were present in the Americas between 2000 BC and 400 AD, however, scientific research has failed to find any evidence of horses during this period. This century-long problem has inspired Mormon apologists to dream up the most desperate apologetics we have seen. That's why you see tapirs, a feeble substitute horse, all over exmormon pages.
The discovery of horse bones from the Book of Mormon period would be paradigm busting research if true. There is a broad scientific consensus view that most large herbivores that greeted the First Americans were eaten into extinction soon after the ice age ended roughly 13,000 years ago. It would be SENSATIONAL news if horses survived alongside highly skilled hunters for over 10,000 years.
The scientific research some Mormons are excited about can be accessed at this link.
https://meridian.allenpress.com/.../POST-PLEISTOCENE... (Wade Miller et al. (2022) 74 (1): Article 5 Post-Pleistocene horses (Equus) from Mexico. The Texas Journal of Science
The first red flag for me is that the lead author of the research, Wade Miller, is a Mormon apologist. He already knows, due to his belief in the Book of Mormon, that horses were there. Miller is a retired BYU geology professor and has recently spoken at Mormon apologetic conferences. This is a concern because Miller has a significant conflict of interest. I wonder how many of his co-authors are also LDS?
The next issue that troubles me is that the paper is published in a very obscure journal. If you want to break a paradigm you need to publish in major journals that all leading scientists read. In this particular case, why wasn’t the research published in a respected archaeological or anthropological journal? The paper may have previously been submitted to these types of journals but rejected for reasons that may be related to issues I discuss below.
Another problem I had with the paper was the inference by the authors that there was “growing information” which implies horses may have survived long after the Late Pleistocene extinction event in Mexico. To back up this claim they cite two papers from the 1800s, one from 1967 and four papers in 2000, 2001, 2004 and 2008 by M. Pichardo. None of these papers provide solid evidence of New World horses surviving into the holocene.
The major problem I have with the paper is that the radiocarbon dates were NOT from collagen (protein) purified from the horse bones (the gold standard). The dates were from charcoal or wood next to the bones. If you are not able to isolate collagen, you are at the mercy of the soil environment which can contaminate the bones AND the adjacent charcoal or wood with much younger carbon. A major source of younger contaminating carbon in soils is rainwater, which contains dissolved carbon dioxide. This very dilute carbonic acid percolates down the soil profile. Evaporation at the soil surface eventually causes the carbonic acid to precipitate out as calcium carbonate, a solid material found in many soils and caves.
From my reading of the paper it is clear that the soils where Miller et al. located the horse bones were rich in carbonates. These are direct quotes from the paper.
Using currently available methods it would be almost impossible to date these Mexican horse bones accurately. The bones, and the charcoal and wood adjacent to the bones, would almost certainly be contaminated with much younger carbonates. The authors are aware of the problem of drawing conclusions from the charcoal and wood dates. They make this surprising admission in the paper, which almost sounds like a response to a reviewer.The overall geology of the region was presented by Cortés & Flores-Díaz (2012) who indicated that carbonate layers extend to a depth of about 7 m. The exposed stratigraphic layers (Fig. 3) represent predominantly spring and paludal deposits along with some shallow lacustrine deposition. While the exposed strata from which fossil specimens were collected and presented here show some variation, the major components consist of various forms of tufa (precipitated calcium carbonate), thus of the roughly 5 m of exposed stratigraphic units, all have a high carbonate signature.
However, if the soil is contaminated with carbonates, it doesn’t matter how close you get to the bones. Even the bones are contaminated! Everything is contaminated with carbonates and the dates would be meaningless. I suspect all experienced scientists would be very cautious about the radiocarbon dates reported in the paper, apart from the dates obtained from collagen extracted from post-Columbus horses.We completely agree with statements that an assessed charcoal sample recovered adjacent to a skeletal element does not necessarily create a precise age for that vertebrate specimen. However, some radiocarbon dated charcoal samples were recovered from within millimeters of Equus bones.
Another reason the dates of the charcoal and wood are less reliable is that some soils may have been disturbed in the past by a flood or earthquake. This can result in older bones being deposited in a new location alongside much younger organic material like charcoal and wood.
For these reasons, scientists will be very cautious about accepting indirect dates from surrounding organic matter. The best evidence is radiocarbon dates from collagen protein purified from bones. This data is lacking in the paper.
Scientists working on Kennewick Man also encountered carbonates, and yet again, Mormons have got the science wrong. This is discussed in detail in a recent paper I co-authored with Thomas Murphy and Angelo Baca. https://www.academia.edu/88679212/Scien ... 8RMFytQGZA
Kennewick Man was a paleolithic hunter whose almost fully intact skeleton was recovered from the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick Washington. Because scientists were able to isolate high quality collagen from several of Kennewick Man’s bones, they were able to determine that he was, without a doubt, around 9,000 years old. However, some of Kennewick Man’s bones were contaminated by carbonates. In order to learn when the carbonates formed they measured radiocarbon dates for several bones. Not surprisingly, the dates were much younger, roughly 2,500 years ago. To this day some Mormon apologists still claim the carbonate dates on Kennewick Man reflect his true age, even after the scientists corrected their false claims.
It's worth noting that the horse species Miller et al. were studying are not the same species as the horses the Spanish brought. They are New World species. This means that Indigenous people would have needed to domesticate them. There is no evidence of pre-Columbian use of horses among indigenous populations anywhere in the Americas.
A FAR more important piece of evidence that Mormons are still lacking is ANY evidence people from the Middle East lived ANYWHERE in the Americas prior to Columbus. Scientists have been researching the DNA of Indigenous Americans for over 40 years. The latest genomic research has revealed no evidence of Book of Mormon people anywhere. Jennifer Raff, professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, recently wrote about the human colonization of the Americas in Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... UG6wxvx4yQ
This is what she said:
Why get excited about horses when there are no Nephites to ride them?All genomic studies rule out the possibility that the First Peoples mixed with Europeans or Africans or any other populations before 1492
A growing number of Mormon apologists (Terryl Givens, Richard Bushman and Patrick Mason) have admitted the Book of Mormon looks in many ways to be "inspired" by 19th century ideas floating around in Joseph Smith's community. They are getting closer to the truth all the time.
