Those of us who have had the misfortune of reading The Book of Mormon know what happened to the Nephites: they were slaughtered by those who were cursed with a skin of blackness, but what happened to the Lamanites? They were going strong for many centuries, but they seem to have vanished in the past 20 years or so.

President Wilford Woodruff said, “Zion is bound to rise and flourish. The Lamanites will blossom as the rose on the mountains.”

Throughout most of my life, I heard Mormon leaders talk about Lamanites in present tense. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who was being referenced when the word “Lamanite” was used. For example, in the October 1980 General Conference, Gene R. Cook of the First Quorum of the Seventy said:
“My family and I are presently living in South America among the Lamanites—the children of Lehi, the people of the Book of Mormon, a people of great promise. For a number of years we have been witnesses to spiritual miracles among that people.”

Conference talks in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s frequently mentioned Lamanites, and the great majority of the time, they were not talking about ancient people, but living indigenous people of the Americas. Even Jesus himself knew who the Lamanites were when he sent Oliver Cowdery and Peter Whitmer “into the wilderness among the Lamanites.” (D&C 32)

BYU used to have a travelling music group called the Lamanite Nation.

So…..where are the Lamanites now? I searched last month’s conference talks, and I found the word “Lamanite” mentioned only once, and that was in reference to the Lamanite woman Abish (Alma 19). Did hundreds of millions of people to whom God made a promise somehow disappear, or are they too sacred to mention now?

chrtistopher columbas discovered them an they realized that they were all indians OPie ~

ziller Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> chrtistopher columbas discovered them an they
> realized that they were all indians OPie ~
American INdians at that

They became counter tops.

That would make them LAMINATES.........

I am in exile.

But I have a summer tour planned in 2022.

Appearing with your exotic dancer, Saucie?

No, no, no!

She sells the tickets and I do the authentic Lamanite dances and scriptural readings.

Would love to meet you 2...

I've watched every one of those preachy new BoM videos and the Lamanites are pretty much AWOL except for King Lamoni, and even he takes the discussions and becomes a frikkin' mormon.
Oddly, in these videos the descendants of Lehi are an ethnic mix of European, Polynesian and Native American. Oh, and maybe a few that look sorta Middle Eastern.
I can't tell who's supposed to be enticing and who's supposed to be cursed.

And we have always been at war with Eurasia...

Prior to 2007: The Lamanites are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.

Now: Lamanites? Who said anything about Lamanites?

Today's Mormonism isn't even the same church that I had belonged to.

And TBMs, even the ones our ages, either refuse to admit it or refuse to understand what it means!!

Plus One Million.

The church I grew up in is dead and what makes it even worst, its denied that it even existed.

My Mormon studies are rusty but didn't the BofM promise that their skins would once again become "white and delightsome"? So, if they are all once again white and delightsome maybe nobody can find them. They have just assimilated and diluted their blood into becoming the ancestors of (is it Ephriam??) some white guy who led the twelve tribes? He's mentioned in my Patriarchial Blessing if I remember correctly. He's the Northern European branch of the twelve tribes. Oh, my aching head.....

Gosh, I threw out all the Bible begats along with my Mormon quad. Oh, I forgot. Somebody at church stole my quad. Well, they are probably still paying tithing so they are welcome to it.

You're asking about Lamanites?
Well let me take a few moments and answer the question you should have asked. Have you seen the new logo? Let me explain the significance of that!

Is there a reference for 'the question(s) they should have asked' told to missionaries to deflect uncomfortable questions ?

that's a beauty!!!

Define Lamanite

They had a disagreement with the 3 Nephites; the outcome is uncertain / to be determined...

Even though the GA's know better than to make a big deal about Lamanites...lowly members can't help but come across the word and read stories of Lamanite wars, bloody beheadings, burnings, etc.

And the young children still enjoy singing the catchy tune "Book of Mormon Stories that my teacher tells to me". When they get a little older, are they going to wonder "where are the Lamanites?"

And what about our college age kids (Generation Z) and Millenials. I'd love to sit down with a group of young adult Mormons and ask them "Who are Lamanites? Where can I find one? What is your understanding of them?" It'd probably be crickets. How do they reconcile that with their continued adherence to the church?

They told me Lamanites are native americans. I think Church seminary is trying to avoid changing narrative by avoiding talking about lamanites, and they still pick it up from older family. These kids were not even phased when I mentioned DNA evidence; you see god simply changed native american DNA to fool the educated.

A lot of relatives withdrew from the world, and are living under the north pole with the lost 10 tribes, playing for Team Manasseh!

Go, Big Brown!!!

Shaking my pom poms for Big Brown !!!!!!!

CrispingPin Wrote:

> I found the > word “Lamanite” mentioned only once, and that
> was in reference to the Lamanite woman Abish (Alma
> 19).

Could this then be the mother of the hero of the book called "Second Witness to the Book of Mormon..." the Book of Zelph.

A prominent character in this, most finely developed, was a Nephite detective called Son of Abish.

Pull down the book online and enjoy the frolicking adventures of this ancient folk who injected Mongolian blood into the jungles of America.

Apparently, Nephite remnants went to Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX-GPBhYwtc&t=58s

Who knew?

You speak of the Lamonites as if they actually once existed or might even exist now. The Lamonites are a figment of Joseph Smith's imagination. They don't exist and never did. The American Indians are a completely different race. They have DNA that originated in Japan and are not related to anyone from Jerusalem.

Pretty much everybody who has studied the DNA.

Japan???

LOL



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 07:08AM by Lot's Wife.

Hedning, I don't think you can document that. The Ainu/Jomon aborigines of Japan are not on the same genetic lineages as the Native Americans.

According to the latest DNA analysis, there were four waves of peoples who entered the Americas, all from northeastern Siberia.

1) A lineage that David Reich and his team term the "First Americans,"
2) Lineage Y,
3) Paleo-Eskimos, and
4) Neo-Eskimos.

Subsets of the first two lineages came down the west coast in about 16,000 YA, spread into the North American heartland, and separated in South America, with the First Americans leaving the Monte Verde site at about 14,500 YA; and the Lineage Y, curiously exhibiting indisputable genetic similarities to peoples in Papua New Guinea, the Andaman Islands, and Australia, establishing a presence in Amazonia that still exists. When the ice-free corridor opened up about 13,000 YA, more First Americans moved en masse into the North American interior and much of South America.

The third and fourth waves came at 5,000 YA and 1,000 YA. It was the Neo-Eskimos who, having mixed with the First Americans, produced the "back migration" into Siberia that accounts for the strong genetic and linguistic relationship between the Chukti peoples of Siberia and some North American Na-Dene tribes. The genetic evidence thus underscores Vajda's 2008 observation about the Yeniseians and their languages.

But there is no genetic evidence of migration from Japan, Sakhalin, or the Kuril Islands into the Americas.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 05:42PM by Lot's Wife.

I suppose we could still say they came from the middle east because most anthropologists still believe humanity began in the fertile valley where the first ruins of City States began between the Tigres and Euphrates river. The land of Chaldeans and Summarians. But at some point tribes scattered to the land of the Rising sun and from there journeyed to the Americas.

So Mandarins could be Hebrews too?

"Humanity began in the fertile [Crescent]?"

LOL

A correction on what "most anthropologists still believe". The Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia/Babylon was one of the first sites for organized agriculture, and the cities that went along with it. However, the entire planet, including the Americas and Australia, had long been populated by humans by that period. The Americas were the last populated continents, but even they had people thousands of years before the rise of Sumer. The rest of the world was settled tens of thousands of years earlier. [Except Polynesia. They were really late to the party ]

Agriculture developed more or less simultaneously all over the world at the end of the last Ice Age. Apparently human culture was already sophisticated enough to realize the advantages of farming, they just needed a stable climate to make it work. Peru (potatoes), Mexico (corn), China (rice), India (? rice, lentils?), Mesopotamia (wheat, barley) and Egypt ( barley?) were all sites of early agriculture based civilizations.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 03:04PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I wouldn't call it "more or less simultaneously."

Fertile Crescent: 9,000 BCE
Yangzi (grains) and Yellow River (rice) Basins: 7,000 BCE
New Guinea: 5,000 BCE
Sub-Saharan Africa: 3,000 BCE
MesoAmerica: 3-2,000 BCE
Northern Americas: 2-1,000 BCE

Both Egypt (Anatolian grains) and India (Anatolian grains and Asian rice) are considered recipients of the new technologies and not sources of agriculture.

Your point, though, is interesting in a number of ways. You suggest that agriculture was more or less inevitable once humans had reached a certain level of technology and, more importantly, the climate had changed. I think that is correct even if the dates at which that happened varied considerably.

I have long wondered if something like that might apply to the emergence of life. Conditions were inhospitable for ten billion or so years after the Big Bang, but as parts of the universe cooled down, formed stable planetary systems, and then experienced the emergence of the right conditions, life began to organize. Like agriculture, this would have happened spontaneously in countless places all within the same billion or so years.

If the same chemical processes were at work, it would then have taken roughly the same amount of time for intelligent life (whatever that means) to evolve. That would imply that groups with something like our intelligence would have arisen in lots of places within a range of several hundred millions years.

If true, that might explain why we have never knowingly encountered other intelligent life. Like us, the other groups may not have developed the technology necessary for interstellar travel. Our sophistication would be within the same range, varying perhaps by several hundred percent but not several thousand percent. The other interesting possibility--assuming that life is a natural phenomenon like the the emergence of agriculture--is that the next step in the evolution of life is its own destruction.

Anyway, the development of agriculture may well illuminate other vital and technological processes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 04:54PM by Lot's Wife.

There you go again, using actual facts. :)

I was thinking I should check the dates and foods involved. I did check on the extent of the Fertile Crescent after I posted. It included the Nike valley, so much larger than just Mesopotamia.

My main point was that agriculture and civilization that went with it developed independently at various locations around the world. I do suspect Mesopotamia, India and Egypt influenced each other. The concept was "in the air", easily discovered once the climate stabilized.

The staple foods varied by location, but the general idea cropped up (so to speak) in lots of cultures. Interestingly, while the whole world shares the staple crops now, they are for the most part the original staples, or close descendants. We didn't discover newer better staple crops, we just turned the originals into Doritos and Tater Tots.


We have no other examples of life, but I like to think life is an inevitable outcome of our universe. Perhaps not with the same DNA code that earth life uses, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same. Earthlife needed to wait until some stars exploded to create all the elements beyond iron in the periodic table.

Or maybe carbon-based life is a transitional form to silicon-based life. [That noise was Henry's head exploding.] it took a few billion years to get from green slime to us. Silicon has a long way to go, but semiconductors are about sixty years old. Kind of impressive progress IMHO.

> I was thinking I should check the dates and foods
> involved. I did check on the extent of the Fertile
> Crescent after I posted. It included the Nike
> valley, so much larger than just Mesopotamia.

Most experts view the Nile Valley as a later extension of the Fertile Crescent's agriculture. India, anticipating your point below, shows clear evidence of deriving grains from the west and rice from the east--just as the Han Chinese combined grains from the Yellow River Valley and rice from the Yellow River complex. There is no doubt that the subsidiary regions mixed and matched, and that those cultures then influenced the original sources.

Parenthetically, do you have a source on India as a location for spontaneous development of agriculture? I'm not familiar with that.


-------------
> My main point was that agriculture and
> civilization that went with it developed
> independently at various locations around the
> world. I do suspect Mesopotamia, India and Egypt
> influenced each other. The concept was "in the
> air", easily discovered once the climate
> stabilized.

Yes.


---------------
> The staple foods varied by location, but the
> general idea cropped up (so to speak) in lots of
> cultures. Interestingly, while the whole world
> shares the staple crops now, they are for the most
> part the original staples, or close descendants.
> We didn't discover newer better staple crops, we
> just turned the originals into Doritos and Tater
> Tots.

Here we get back to Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel. The presence of cultivatable plants and domesticatable animals gave the Fertile Crescent and its Asian and European extensions a huge advantage over Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and NG-Australia. The scene with which the book opens is a New Guinean tribal leader asking why the West got so much richer, and the book presents the answer.


--------------
> We have no other examples of life, but I like to
> think life is an inevitable outcome of our
> universe.

Thomas Mann said that. He described life as "a species of death," meaning that chemicals spontaneously organize as life before presumably returning to their more natural state.


-----------------
> Or maybe carbon-based life is a transitional form
> to silicon-based life. it took a few billion
> years to get from green slime to us. Silicon has a
> long way to go, but semiconductors are about sixty
> years old. Kind of impressive progress IMHO.

In my musings about the inevitability of life around the universe, I almost mentioned the silicon alternative to carbon. But the last time I did that, it spawned such a debate that my main point was lost. Yet I agree, there could be a slew of life forms based on carbon and another slew based on silicon. I can't see any reason why, in a universe of possibilities, that would not have happened.



PS: If you haven't read it, you might enjoy David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here. His lab is probably the best in the world at tracking human evolution and migrations from Homo Erectus to the present through DNA, and this is his attempt, partly successful, to summarize their findings in terms that anthropologists and archaeologists (shout out to Richard the Bad, who might like it too) can understand.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2020 06:22PM by Lot's Wife.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Sounds interesting.

I had a roomie at BYU taking an organic chemistry class, and one of the assignments (a major term paper type assignment, as I recall) was to explore the idea of silicon as the basis for an organic chemistry, instead of carbon. Silicon is right under carbon on the periodic chart, and shares some properties.

Yes, among them (I believe) the ability to bind with many different elements to create molecules that perform a wide range of functions.

I wouldn't be rolling over for this alleged fact-checking so easily.

Just as an obvious example, that date about Mesoamerica is utterly laughable. Corn was domesticated 8700 years ago, and scientists recognize a similar date for potatoes in the Andes.

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2009/03/23/corn-domesticated-from-mexican-wild-grass-8700-years-ago/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171213161108.htm

The Nile River Valley was first inhabited circa 6000 BCE, but the term "Fertile Crescent" (which included Mesopotamia as well) was coined in 1914 by James Henry Breasted. He included the Nile Valley as well, a practice still followed; here is a contemporary interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent

>> The western zone around the Jordan and upper Euphrates rivers gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements (referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)), which date to around 9,000 BCE and includes very ancient sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Jericho (Tell es-Sultan).

This claim, "Most experts view the Nile Valley as a later extension of the Fertile Crescent's agriculture," ignores the geography of Egypt and amounts, IMO, to unwarranted hyper-diffusionist speculation. It's quite reasonable to suggest that agriculture arose independently in both areas.

As for speculation about life arising elsewhere, I'll borrow a line from my friend Kirby: "Beats the $#!% out of me."

I don't see its relevance to this discussion, however.

"most anthropologists still believe"

The non-believing anthropologist would not agree with you. They are the anthropologists of a darker descent.

The name of the musical group was The Lamanite Generation.

I stand corrected. Well, actually I’m sitting down.

I can understand how replacing "Nation" with "Generation" can be a real shock to the system. Try breathing into a paper bag. :)

I'm pretty sure Lamanite will never be used as an adjective in any church approved activity ever again. It might get trotted out in remarks at a temple dedication in Central America where there is a large indigenous component to the population. But a musical group? No way in hell.

Speaking of Anthropology, a good friend of mine worked his way out of the cult and got most of the post-mormon healing he needed through his Anthropology degree program. Anthropology includes a wide range of understanding different human cultures and beliefs without religion, and get a better understanding of human nature. As an Anthropologist, you can go in to a wide range of professions from researcher to diplomat.

azsteve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Speaking of Anthropology, a good friend of mine
> worked his way out of the cult and got most of the
> post-mormon healing he needed through his
> Anthropology degree program. Anthropology includes
> a wide range of understanding different human
> cultures and beliefs without religion, and get a
> better understanding of human nature. As an
> Anthropologist, you can go in to a wide range of
> professions from researcher to diplomat.

I have made an anthropolgic study of translations of cuneiform tablets and have found it fascinating.
It started with Tellinger's book The Slave Species of God, then went to the Enuma Elish, then to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then guess what-- I found Sitchen's translation of the Lost Book of Enki and I was hooked.
For all intents and purposes Mormon theology is destroyed by that one tome.
Many dispute it but I accept it as possible therefore worth considering

Since they were a figment of Joe Jr.'s imagination they never existed so nothing happened to them

All the lamanites listened to the Lamanite Generation sing GO, MY SON... and they all went.