Joseph's (old testament) wife was Asenath. She was the daughter of an Egyptian priest. As such, her DNA would likely not have resembled the Hebrew DNA. It is my understanding that Mitochondrial DNA is what is preserves DNA identity as it passes from mother to child.

Asenath was the mother of Ephraim and Manasseh. Book of Mormon Lehi is allegedly a descendant of Manasseh. Book of Mormon Ishmael is allegedly a descendant of Ephraim.

Does the relevant DNA sample exist to compare Hebrew DNA with the DNA of modern Native/Meso-Americans? If the mitochondrial DNA of Lehi and Manasseh was not Hebrew (passed to them from Asenath), is it pointless to try to find a Hebrew genetic trace in today's Native/Meso-Americans?

I've heard it argued that Asenath's genetic composition was likely a complete mash-up that likely came from numerous genetic sources (common for people of northern Africa). Therefore, there is no reliable DNA sample to use for the purposes of comparing Book of Mormon populations with today's indigenous inhabitants of North and Meso-America.

What am I missing? Calling Simon Southerton......

Even if the story of Joseph in Egypt were true, Lehi's descendants' DNA shouldn't match with those living in northeast Asia so closely.

Mitochondrial DNA is one thing.

Y-chromosome DNA is another. There should be Hebrew markers in
the Y-chromosomes. There is not. The Y-chromosomes are
independent of who the mother is.

If she was the daughter of an Egyptian priest, wouldn't she have "Black Blood" and none of the descendants be eligible for any kind of Priesthood - at least til the late 1970's?

Not necessarily. O.K., I will confess, i majored in math and minored in electronics, so history was not my major. However, I find the subject interesting.

I have read Herodotus who is considered the 'father' of modern history. Herodotus traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaigns and wrote about his adventures in Egypt. He says the skin colors of Egyptians varied. He said there were people with black skin, but those people came from further south of the 'second cataracts' (in Ethiopia). People with black skin were not considered 'inferior' just exotic.

Now, I will throw a monkey wrench into what I just stated, the face on the sphinx is considered/believed not to be Khafre; Khafre may have had it rebuilt and re-dedicated. Some Egyptologists believe the face was that of a "negroid' race, not related to the caucasian race that dominated Egypt from 3,500 BC until the time of Alexander. Now, everyone has an opinion of the age of items in Egypt, I believe in the space alien theory, so I naturally assert things like the pyramids being much older.

Now that twit Hawas, Egypt's 'official' curator of antiquities, usually foams at the mouth when the Art Bell/Coast to Coast AM people show up pointing to UFO's and space aliens.

This has been proven conclusively by microcopic examination of the hair follicles in his mummy...

Now if you weren't being TIC with that "space aliens" and smear against Hawass, I'm wondering why you're still not in the LDS Church... Makes as much sense...

And you do know what Herodotus' nickname was, right?

Mitochondrial DNA only passes on to the next generation through mothers. So, Ephraim and Manasseh's children would not have gotten the Mitochondrial DNA that Asenath gave Ephraim and Manasseh, but would have gotten their Mitochondrial DNA from Ephraim and Manasseh's wives. And the Mitochondrial DNA that would have come to the New World with Lehi's party would have been from the women/wives/mothers that came on the voyage, not from the men.

However, the important point here is that the vast majority of modern Native American DNA (Mitochondrial and otherwise) has been shown to have come from Siberia several THOUSANDS of years before the Book of Mormon peoples allegedly arrived in America. There have been traces of Semitic DNA discovered among modern Native American populations, but this Semitic DNA has been be shown to have been introduced AFTER Columbus, a thousand years after the BoM story ends.

That's a basic summary of the DNA question as it pertains to the Book of Mormon. Maybe some of our resident experts can expand on this.

It's like this: There are five haplogroups of mtDNA among Native Americans (and a sixth, Halplogroup M, was found in some skeletal remains in Canada, leading to the belief other DNA lineages may have gone extinct. Don't get excited, they were dated to thousands of years before Lehi or the Jaredites).

Think of those five haplogroups as five colored marbles, say green, blue, red, orange, and dark gray...

To continue the metaphor, mitochondrial DNA from the Middle East--including Egypt--consists of marbles that are purple, white, black, yellow, pink, turquoise, and a few others...

The only one that is close to any North American HG is a light gray (Haplogroup X); the only thing this one proves is that some Native Americans had a common ancestor with some Europeans and Middle Easterners, on the order of 50,000 years ago or thereabouts. This was long before the ancestors of today's N/A's crossed the Bering land bridge...

Simon's around; I heard from him a few weeks ago, and if I'd said anything incorrect with this analogy--which I've posted before--I would've heard from him.

The common apologetic tactic is to claim "We don't know what Lehi's DNA looked like," which is a bald-faced lie. Same with Asaneeth's... We know what it didn't look like, which are the five HG's extant among today's Indians... And we also know what Middle Eastern DNA looked like in general, and it was nothing like those mentioned.

Y-chromosome and even autosomal DNA are starting to offer evidence confirming this "truth," and the reason for doing DNA research on Native Americans is to fill out the actual history of the colonization of this hemisphere as accurately as possible.

That means that the fraudulent myth of the BOM has no role in that reconstruction.

Heh heh, The issue of Joseph's wife being Egyptian, and therefore having black blood, thus rendering the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh ineligible for the priesthood, was a question I posed to my seminary teacher at Church College (CCNZ). He said he would get back to me. Still waiting on that one.

It was related to the bronze age myth problems I was having with the Book of Abraham and The Book of Mormon.

I was an amateur apologist and eventually worked out (in conjunction with my still TBM mother) that there was a possibility that Asenath was Hyksos (from a group of probably white invaders of Egypt). Although I am reasonably sure that priest families would have been native Egyptian, the presence of the Hyksos in Egypt leaves enough wiggle room there. My amateur apologetics were only good for a few years before the weight of science completely sunk any possibility that the global flood, garden of Eden, or tower of Babel could have any basis in fact.

That would only be relevant if Lehi & Ishmael & Mulek were all 3 direct descendents of Asenath - all through all male. As soon as you add one Israelite woman to any of those 3 lines you have the markers.

The Oncoming Storm - bc Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That would only be relevant if Lehi & Ishmael &
> Mulek were all 3 direct descendents of Asenath -
> all through all male. As soon as you add one
> Israelite woman to any of those 3 lines you have
> the markers.

That's the nail Mulek was a direct descendent of Judah, as the son of king zedekiah, according to the BoM. He brought a big clan with him and founded what became the largest Nehpite city: Zarahemla.

Middle east Y-DNA should abound by their rules.

The beauty of DNA is that it isn't a small set of flags, but a vast palette.

For the mitochondrial DNA to be purely Egyptian (which doesn't show up in the Native American genome) it would require ALL descendants of Asenath to have married ONLY Egyptian women (including Sariah and Ishmael's wife). We have at least partial record of their genealogy, and that seems incredibly unlikely (though into impossible, since the bible largely ignores women): http://www.lds.org/scriptures/ot/num/27.1?lang=eng#primary

But assuming a completely pure line of mitochondrial DNA, we can still see the vast palette of DNA that isn't linked completely to the matriarchal line.

We are able to draw maps of where your heritage is from, and where they migrated to, based on matching sequences.

Think of it like a REALLY long journal in a bunch of languages you don't understand. You may not know what it all means, but you can say "In all the known literature in the world, I've only seen that exact phrase used in region X." So you can pattern match different sections of the journal to see where the text was copied from.

You can also look at the mutation rates to see the relative age of DNA segments (think of it like monks copying biblical text- Monk A typos something, Monk B copies that typo and makes some of his own, etc... so we can tell a general hierarchy of texts, allowing us to know which copies are older/newer)

100% not true

Apologetic propaganda is basically that "we don't know what BoM DNA looks like, so it might be all over the place".

Migrants accross the Bering land bridge left a DNA trail right back to Siberia. There's a gradient of related DNA leading right back to where Native Americans came from. There's no mystery DNA. It's all accounted for. We can rule out Book of Mormon DNA for the same reason we can rule out Martian or Atlantis DNA. We have no reliable examples of Jupiterian DNA either, but we can safely say there's none here simply because all the DNA here is traceable back to a known common ancestry. Same is true of Native Americans.
To say they could be harboring Book of Mormon DNA is to say there's DNA we can't account for. It's saying that geneticists are asking "what's this?" and they don't know. It's saying there's mystery DNA that could be from...anywhere.
That's not the case.

So, we don't know what Asenath's mitochondrial DNA looked like? So, she could be the ancestor of Native Americans? OK, then the REAL ancestor who is a KNOWN Siberian is out of a job.