In the spring of 2003, I was home alone watching PBS (yep, geek) when they broadcast geneticist Spencer Wells' film The Journey of Man, documenting the journey our species made to go from living in a small region in Africa to living in all corners of the globe. I was riveted by how science could unlock such a mystery.
A couple of things surprised me. First, this study placed our common male ancestor "Adam" as having lived about 50,000 years ago. I'd been taught that Adam and Eve lived about 6000 years ago, and since they were the first man and woman, no humans had lived on this planet before that.
Second, not one bit of evidence pointed toward the American Indians having descended from Middle Eastern ancestors. Yet the introduction to the Book of Mormon stated explicitly that a small group of people that God led out of Jerusalem in 600 B.C. came and populated North and South America and that "they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians" (from the edition of the Book of Mormon copyrighted 1981).
It seemed a little strange to me that scientific research was contradicting rather than confirming what had been revealed by God, but, well, no worries. Science gets stuff wrong all the time. They used the think the world was flat, for crying out loud. Besides, I had a witness from the Holy Ghost.
Interestingly, in 2006, the Church published a new edition of the Book of Mormon and altered the introduction to say that the Book of Mormon characters from Jerusalem are "among" the ancestors of the American Indians, rather than their principal ancestors. Considering that they claim to get their information straight from God, they sure seem to need to tweak things pretty frequently, but I guess DNA evidence can be a real bitch.
