Articles: Anachronistic Animals
Table of Contents
Among the anachronisms in the text, there are many instances where animals are mentioned for which there is good reason to believe that they did not exist in the Americas during the time period covered. [1]
Asses (Donkeys)
The text mentions asses in several passages as being present in the Americas prior to contact with Europe in the modern era.
The donkey was first domesticated in the Old World from the African wild ass. No record of this domesticated animal exists in the New World prior to its introduction by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the Caribbean. [2]
Apologetic Response [3]
The word ass may be a loanshift for an animal unfamiliar to the authors of the text. A loanshift is the application of a familiar word to a new meaning. An example is the name hippopotamus which means river horse in Greek: hippos (ἵππος) “horse” and potamos (ποταμός) “river”. The hippopotamus is obviously not a true horse, but the Greeks who named it thought they were related or at least resembled each other in some way.
Perhaps the word ass refers to another animal found in the Americas, such as the tapir, which resembles the donkey in some ways and have some history of being tamed by people in the Americas.
Critical Rejoinder
The proposal of a loanshift would make more sense if Joseph Smith claimed to translate the text by mundane means. If God directed the translation, then it is difficult to explain why he would have led Smith to use the word ass in these verses. Even if the Jaredites and Nephites referred to the tapir as the equivalent of the word ass in their languages, an omniscient God should have been able to provide a better translation to Smith. God could have provided Smith with the name tapir which was in use at the time of the claimed translation, [4] or he could have provided a direct transliteration of the ancient words used (cf. cureloms and cumoms in Ether 9:19). This would have avoided needless criticism, if this was an inspired translation of an ancient text.
Furthermore, the juxtaposition of ass and horse in both 1 Nephi 18:25 and Ether 9:19 seems to indicate that the author of the text intended them to either be identically the donkey and horse or to be related closely like the donkey and horse. The use of the common idiom dumb ass in Mosiah 12:5 and 21:3 which refers to the donkey lends credence to idea that the author intended ass to mean the same animal as donkey.
The most parsimonious reading of the text would be that it was authored by a modern person who intended that ass meant the animal we mean when we say ass but who was unaware that these animals were not present in pre-Columbian America. There is insufficient evidence to reject this simplest explanation.
Bees
Ether 2:3 tells how the Jaredites carried honeybees with them in their exodus from the Tower of Babel. Ether 6:4 implies that they may have brought them with them to the Americas.
Some have pointed out that the European honeybee was not introduced to the Americas until the modern era. [5]
Apologetic Response [6]
Bees were never mentioned in the New World, so the text never claims that American inhabitants kept honeybees.
Even if the text stated that they did, the Maya kept Melipona beecheii, a stingless honeybee, prior to the introduction of Apis mellifera by Europeans in the modern era. [7] [8]
Critical Rejoinder
It must be conceded that the text only mentions bees in the Old World, but it also implies that these bees and other animals were gathered to be brought to the promised land, even if it never explicitly states that they did. The fact that the Maya kept Melipona beecheii is immaterial because the genus Melipona is not a native to the Old World. [9] They couldn’t be the species the Jaredites are claimed to have captured and possibly brought to the New World.
Cattle, Oxen, and Cows
The text refers several times to cattle. If the word cattle is taken in its most general sense of any domesticated quadruped (in order to be generous), the only candidates for which we have evidence are llamas, alpacas, and (tenuously) guinea pigs. Indigenous Americans were not as successful in domesticating animals as people of the Old World. [10] [11]
However, cattle typically refers to members of the genus Bos. Colloquially known as cows, there is no evidence that cattle existed in the Americas prior to the Columbian Exchange.
If we tentatively accept the llama or alpaca as the animal that the text refers to as cattle, this doesn’t account for why the text also refers to oxen and cows which are specific descriptions of the genus Bos.
Apologetic Response [12]
The terms cattle, cows, and oxen were probably the use of a familiar word for a new and unfamiliar animal.
Elephants
Ether 9:19 implies that the Jaredites had domesticated elephants. The African and Asian species of elephants never existed on the American continents. Elephantine species like the mammoth and mastodon had gone extinct by the presumed Jaredite period (i.e. during the Pleistocene extinction of megafauna), though some isolated populations of mammoth lived as recently as 2,000 BCE on islands not occupied by humans. [13] There is no evidence that humans in the Americas domesticated any of these species.
Goats
The text mentions that the inhabitants of the Americas raised “goats and wild goats”. Goats were first domesticated in the Old World about 10,000 years ago and were brought to America as part of the Columbian Exchange.
Horses
About 1 million years ago, there were great herds of animals closely related to the modern horse on all of the continents except Australia and Antarctica. In the very late Pleistocene (about 12,000 years ago) all horse-related species in the Americas went extinct. Scientists debate why this happened—one possibility is over-hunting by humans arriving from Asia—but the fossil record shows no horses in the Americas after the Pleistocene. [14] [15] [16]
Christopher Columbus brought the first modern horses to the Americas on his second voyage in 1493. [17] Cortez brought them to mainland North America in 1509. [18]
Between their extinction and the reintroduction by Columbus, there is no credible evidence of horses or closely related horse species in the Americas. Nothing in the fossil record and nothing in the written or pictographic record to indicate that humans were in contact with horses during the Book of Mormon period.
Swine
The text mentions swine twice: once indicates that the Jaredites raised swine, once in a context that implies that the Nephites knew what a swine is hundreds of years after their migration from the Old World. There is no evidence that swine existed or were domesticated in the Americas. They were domesticated in the Old World and brought to the New World after contact with Europe.
Apologetic Responses
Chapters Mentioning Anachronistic Animals
Freethinker's Book of Mormon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.blakeclan.org.