LOL. Oh REALLY? First I've heard of it, LOL. Did they go into details or follow up with any actual kind of proof? Likely it was just hearsay to them. I love how Mormons spread all kinds of gossip about all the ways in which you can 'prove' their church is 'true' when none of them actually do any kind of research or investigation into those alleged pieces of 'evidence.'
And what does Central America have to do with it? The plates were supposedly found in NORTH America and it supposed to be an account of North American peoples.. if anything happened in Central America, why would Moroni have gone all the way up to New York to bury his plates? It's pretty freaking far away, esp. for those days.. and wasn't that while he was basically dying? And why was I always led to believe by TSCC that the BoM was exclusively written about our country (USA land)?
first off the ruins that are spoken of predate the so called migration of Lehi and co. by thousands of years. The Olmec and Toltec civilizations have no connection to an imagined migratio of Hebrews.
I used to look at maps of what is in Central America along with the dates the various cities were populated. None of them ever matched what was in the BoM. Before that I assumed that the narrow neck of land was the narrow bit of land between Central and South America (I am sure that is what Joseph Smith had in mind). Then others more learned than I explained that it all took place in Central America. They also explained to me that the directions mentioned in the BoM were different somehow. So North to them was some other random direction, making the Sea West (or East?) not where we would think it was. Yet somehow Joseph Smith found Nephite ruins in Missouri. None of it made any sense to me, but if someone is willing to accept that nonsense, then they will accept anything the church tells them.
When I was 14 (1967) my family went to Mexico to see the pyramids.
IDK what the hell my mother had been reading, but she acted like she knew it all. She went on and on about how the white God Quetzaqcoatal (sp?) was Jesus himself. Blah blah blah. This was a woman who had never owned or read a BoM. This was some shit she'd heard in GD class or from someone. I never saw her read a book the entire time i've known her. My father was even more of an illiterate than her.
I remember thinking that she was full of shit. Time went on, and she went over the top crazy about everything mormon even though she'd never cracked open a book. This was decades before the internet. Not that it would have made a difference. She still doesn't read anything. She still believes whatever it was someone told her in the 60's. She'd even stand up and give sworn testimony to the truth of it all. This was the crazy I was raised by.
It's taken me years of therapy to flush the crazy BS out of my mind. I did whatever it took to do that. I'm clean for 6 years now, and pretty sure there will be NO relapses.