DiscussMormonism.com

I'm guessing that was hitting the query limit more than anything else.

A.I. Jesus is now here:

https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus

Looks like www.ldsbot.com does not work but ldsbot.com does work.

Interesting comment from the bot on horses in the Book of Mormon:

"Pre-Columbian horses: In 2022, research published in the Texas Journal of Science documented evidence of pre-Columbian horse remains in Mexico from dates corresponding to the Book of Mormon, potentially supporting its claims of horses in the Americas."

Anyone checked this reference?

It turns up quickly if you google "Texas Journal of Science horses". The lead author is Wade Miller, who retired from BYU in 2002 and has been a long-term champion of pre-Columbian American horses. I don't know whether he's taken seriously or regarded as a crank.

They found a bunch of fossil teeth a couple of meters down, lying next to bits of charcoal that were carbon-dated to various times between 1500 and 3000 years ago or so. They have no direct dates for the teeth themselves. That's normal; fossils don't usually contain carbon, and radiometric dating with other elements has uncertainty ranges of hundreds of thousands of years.

They identify the teeth as those of native North American horses that most people think went extinct 10000 years ago or so. The identification discussion runs a lot longer than the dating part, but I can't tell whether the horse identification is solid or doubtful.

Their main reason for not thinking that older teeth got mixed up with younger charcoal seems to be that they didn't find any other fossils of extinct species at the site in the layers that had charcoal of those ages. I don't know how widely or thoroughly they looked for such rejumbled fossils. It's obviously possible in principle for much older fossils to get mixed up with younger stuff, if for instance there were a flood that washed up some old bones and teeth one time, or if some medieval Mexicans dug up some Ice Age horse teeth at some point. That kind of complication to fossil records doesn't just happen all the time, but it happens. It's usually not an issue for dating fossils that are millions of years old and found buried in rock, since then you probably have uncertainties of a few million years anyway, and floods and scavengers are unlikely to mix things that were buried a million years apart. I don't know how big an issue mixing is for much more recent stuff like these horse teeth.

hauslern wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 02, 2023 7:35 am

Interesting comment from the bot on horses in the Book of Mormon:

"Pre-Columbian horses: In 2022, research published in the Texas Journal of Science documented evidence of pre-Columbian horse remains in Mexico from dates corresponding to the Book of Mormon, potentially supporting its claims of horses in the Americas."

Anyone checked this reference?

To add to what physics guy already said, I think the location of the teeth are in a place that no one theorizes the events of the Book of Mormon occured. So it's still pretty silly for the LDS to act like this is good evidence. The tapir explanation is probably just as likely at this point.

Bill_Billiams wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:37 pm

hauslern wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 02, 2023 7:35 am

Interesting comment from the bot on horses in the Book of Mormon:

"Pre-Columbian horses: In 2022, research published in the Texas Journal of Science documented evidence of pre-Columbian horse remains in Mexico from dates corresponding to the Book of Mormon, potentially supporting its claims of horses in the Americas."

Anyone checked this reference?

To add to what physics guy already said, I think the location of the teeth are in a place that no one theorizes the events of the Book of Mormon occured. So it's still pretty silly for the LDS to act like this is good evidence. The tapir explanation is probably just as likely at this point.

I'm waiting for the discovery of the teeth and bones of cumoms and cureloms.