Last night I attended an event in Los Angeles for the Heritage Month Celebration: The City lit up City Hall with lavender lights in support of LGBTQ people in LA. They recognized and honored, among others, African Americans, Asians, LGBTs, and Native Americans.

There was a Native American woman at my table with whom I chatted for a while. She could have easily dressed in fringed leather and made a very convincing Pocahontas.

Her tribe, she said, is unique in that it has its roots on the West side of Los Angeles, and very few people are aware of them. She directs a small museum at a local high school.

I told her that as a former Mormon, I used to beleive that her people originally came from Jerusalem. She laughed and said, "There's no way. No way! All you have to do is look at the babies' butts."

"What?!" I asked for details.

She explained that true Native American infants, AND Asian infants are born with a blue/black mark on their butts. White people don't have it.

I marveled at what she said, because I'd never heard of anything like this. So I decided to research her claim, and here's what I found (from Wikipedia, under "Mongolian Spot"):

"A Mongolian spot, also known as "Mongolian blue spot", "congenital dermal melanocytosis",[1] and "dermal melanocytosis"[1] is a benign, flat, congenital birthmark with wavy borders and irregular shape, discovered on and named after Mongolians by Erwin Bälz.[2][3] It is also extremely prevalent among East Asians, South-East Asians, South Asians, Polynesians, Native Americans, and East Africans.[4][5] It normally disappears three to five years after birth and almost always by puberty.[6] The most common color is blue, although they can be blue-gray, blue-black or even deep brown.

"Rough estimates are that the Mongolian spots are most prevalent among infants of East Asian groups, although is present also among European infants 40-45%[citation needed], American Indian 80-85%, Roma 85-90% and black infants. Infants may be born with one or more Mongolian spots ranging from small area on the buttocks to a larger area on the back. They also occur in about 90-95% and about 80-85% of East African and Native American infants, respectively.[4] Approximately 90% of Polynesians and Micronesians are born with Mongolian spots, as are about 46% of Latin American children.[9] These spots also appear on 5-10% of babies of full Caucasian descent, Coria del Río in Spain has a high incident due to historic Japanese settlers."

So, that settles it. Native Americans came from Mongolia, NOT from Jerusalem.

Now, if we could just find some damn Lamanites..... and check out their babies' butts!

But you also said East Africa, so Nephi must have been a White and Delightsome Ethiopian: problem solved!

I believe that the DNS studies demonstrated this ancestry quite clearly... Just saying...

My half sister and brother have a Native American father. They both had the spot...I can attest. I called my baby sister "spotty @$$" until my mother told me to stop it.

But that doesn't seem to be true - it seems that the spots also appear in fair-skinned infants (just with less frequency). The spots are simply clusters of melanocytes that are located in a layer of skin that usually doesn't house melanocytes. The frequency of the expression of the spots in a demographic seems to be a function of skin pigment - not common genetic origin (for example,the spots appear in Roma and East African children with about the same frequency as in East African and Native American children).

The genetic evidence is very clear that Native Americans are not of Semetic origin. Why muddy the waters (and play in the Mormon sandbox) by claiming the blue spot is dispositive of the issue when it doesn't seem to be?

Oh good grief!

Sorry if I "muddied your water." You are hereby BANNED from playing in MY sandbox for the whole rest of the day.

Cleary it's a tongue in cheek anecdote, if you'll forgive the pun. We're a light hearted crowd, not given to using prose that would get us thrown out of a biker bar.

Oh yeah, 2/3 of my part native american kids have had the blue spots!

My kids are half black/halt white and they both have Mongolian spots. When my dd was just a few days old someone asked if they were bruises(around her ankles). We did not know what they were but everyone in the hospital did. It is pretty common.

How have I gone through life without ever knowing this?
Wow! I learn something every day.

This is good to know. My daughter is marrying a Cuban. I'm sure she would go into a panic if she had a baby that looked like it was bruised. I'll have to fill her in.

I can't get over the fact I didn't know about this little tid bit. I've worked in hospitals, I went to school in a medical related field. I've had a lot of friends that are asian, hispanic, etc. I never heard of this one.

but they add up.

There has been research on the dogs that Native Americans had before Columbus. Those dogs are long gone, but they had DNA that matched East Asian dogs, not Middle Eastern.

There is a genetic difference in stomach bacteria in East Asians and Middle Eastern people. Guess which kind Native Americans had.

There is lots of pollen in pre Columbian artifacts. Guess how much of it is wheat and other foodstuffs mentioned in the BoM, as opposed to corn, beans, tomatos. Yep.

The details of a civilization don't exist in a vacuum. There are always interconnections. Mormons tend to miss this big picture.

"The details of a civilization don't exist in a vacuum. There are always interconnections. Mormons tend to miss this big picture."

I'll say. Today's Mountain Mos are only a few decades away from their cowboy roots, and yet they don't even consider that a huge BOM Nephite civilization whose transportation system was based on the horse and wheel would necessarily leave behind large amounts of material culture based on horse care and use.

Hello, cowboys--where are the Nephite horsepaths and highways, their pastures, their stables, their smithies, their foundries and ironworks, their wheelwrights, their coal mines, their tanneries, their manure piles, their feed crops, their granaries and silos, their barns, their watering troughs and a thousand other horse-related items?

Don't even get started on the wheel...

my hubby has this mark, he's hispanic. i never knew anyone else had this mark.

Hey, I learned about this on my mission in Japan back in the seventies. Some investigator (who had a newborn) asked us if American babies had blue spots on the butt. My companion and I looked at each other. She showed the spot to us. Of course, I don't know that I'd ever seen a baby's butt before, so I couldn't say whether Americans had them or not. My companion said he'd never seen one. Later, I asked a Japanese lady in the church about it, and she pretty much explained the situation as the OP did.

I'd never heard of this, even though I spent my mission among Canadian Indians. Of course, I wasn't looking at kids' bare butts.

Much earlier in my life I worked at an infant day care center and saw the blue spot on the sweet bottom of an Asian baby.

When we toured Mayan ruins a few weeks ago, our guide was discussing the origins of the Mayans and mentioned DNA and the Mongolian blue spot as proof of Asian origins.

LMAO...I have never heard of this. Now I have to ask Native and Asian friends if they were born with any blue spots on their bums.

Lol my sister and I both had these spots. Never knew there was an actual name for them or that they were from us being native american.

I am Native American and my mother will attest that I had a Mongolian spot, as did all my siblings. My children had them too. In fact, we once had to explain Mongolian spots to a non-Indian baby-sitter who was going to call CPS because of the "bruises" on our baby's butt.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2012 03:21AM by Ex-Lamanite.

When I was in Mongolia I thought the people there looked a lot like the Shosone and Bannock indians I grew up around.

What always bothered me growing up is all the history in school was based on western civilization and ignored everything else. All old Joe did was apply the bible to the new world. As Samuel Clemens said, the Book of Mormon is a bad plagerism of the bible.

I didn't know about this either, ty

My sister, (we're of European descent) is married to a Navajo guy. Even their kids have Mongolian Spots.

I didn't know about this. How interesting..

My Chinese wife has a blue butt, too. In her case, it's because we barely heat our house in Coldorado.
If American Indians have this too, it proves thathe decendants of the Book of Mormon people could not possibly be the American Indians.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2012 12:38AM by robertgiftnevermo.

Really? The spots come back if you're a Chinese person living in COLDorado? :)

I'm half Latin and have the spot on the sole of my right foot.

And I have never heard of this before either and consider myself fairly well-read. Can't believe I never ran across this tidbit.

Anagrammy

"Every little butt helps."

and neither I nor my wife are native American in any way

Me: British (mix of English, Welsh and Scots) grafted on a French Huguenot basis (17th century)

Her: half Russian Jewish, half French from Anjou...

We were told that it's a recessive gene which is mainly a marker of Asian ancestry. On her side, that obviously comes from the Russian-jewish side, as her father looked like you'd expect Ghengis Khan to look.

But on my side... a mystery!

It doesn't disprove it. All that needed to happen was for Nephite or Lamanite descendants to mix with Mongolian/Asian migrants. Mormons don't claim only BOM people came to America before Columbus.

Just come out and say it crazyfoo, Mormons now claim that descendants of Adam and Eve mixed with descendants of people that were not from Adam and Eve.

. . . are part Asian. One had the spot, the other did not. No one in the caucasian-only part of the fmaily has ever had it.

On mixing of Nephites and Asians in the Americas, yes, the church now teaches that there were non-Nephites all over when Lehi's family arrived. But that is a new and specious argument. The old doctrine, stated in a few places in the BOM and reiterated ad nauseum by the prophets and apostles, was that God kept the Americas separate and only brought his chosen peoples to the continents. There was not, and could not be, independent migrations from Asia. So when apologists say that there were already people in the Americas, they are contradicting their own scripture.

Polynesians also get this.

I served my mission in Korea. Most of the kids under 5 or 6 ran around naked in the summertime. They had the blue spot. I mistakenly believed that the blue spot was unique to Koreans.