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I am unaware of any POLICY changes that the LDS Church has made in response to any DNA studies. The LDS Church has never had an official position on where the events of the Book of Mormon took place other than \
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I am unaware of any POLICY changes that the LDS Church has made in response to any DNA studies. The LDS Church has never had an official position on where the events of the Book of Mormon took place other than \\\"somewhere in the Americas.\\\" The Book of Mormon introduction did receive a slight alteration recently to change \\\"the principal ancestors of the American Indians\\\" to \\\"among the ancestors of the American Indians,\\\" but it is debatable whether this was because of any genetic study.
Did you read the link I posted earlier which is basically the Church\\\'s response to DNA studies?
The basic position of the Church is that it does not expect that DNA studies will either confirm or deny the Book of Mormon. The reasons are:
1. The Founder Effect. We basically have no idea of what Lehi and his family\\\'s DNA should look like in the first place. We therefore have no idea what genetic traits in a Native American would point to having a Lehite ancestor. To say \\\"we haven\\\'t found any pre-1490 Jewish genetic traits in any Native Americans\\\" is pretty much completely irrelevant to the claims of the Book of Mormon.
2. Population Bottleneck. Not only does the Book of Mormon describe a genocidal war that eliminated the Nephites as a people, but the European conquest was devastating to the genetic diversity of the Native American peoples. Genetic traits that might have shown Lehite ancestry, if we knew what to look for, may have been lost in either event.
3. Genetic Drift. Genetic drift is the slow loss of distinctive genetic traits over generations. It is especially prominent in small, isolated communities. It is possible that Lehite genetic traits could have been lost through genetic drift.
Again, these are not \\\"out there\\\" theories, but pretty basic genetics. It\\\'s simply very unlikely that genetic studies will prove anything about the Book of Mormon\\\'s claims for the ancestry of the American Indian.
Mr. Murphy is only nominally a member of the LDS Church. He seems to have enjoyed parading his unbelief before the media, practically daring the Church to excommunicate him. He could hardly be considered an unbiased source of information.
The \\\"Limited Geography\\\" model might indeed be called a \\\"non-traditional\\\" reading of the Book of Mormon, in that early Church members tended to believe in what might be called the \\\"hemispherical\\\" model - that the Lehites were the only people in the Americas during the Book of Mormon period and that their civilization covered a good portion of the Western Hemisphere. However, the Limited Geography model is not popular among LDS scholars because of genetic studies, and it in fact pre-dates any understanding of DNA. It first appeared in the 1920s (Janne Sjodahl in the LDS publication \\\'\\\'Improvement Era\\\'\\\'). The model came about because a close reading of the text revealed that the travel times mentioned indicated a much more limited area than the hemispheric model. It became popular enough to appear in Church educational materials in the late \\\'30s, and it has gained popularity among LDS scholars since that time simply because it seems to better fit the text. It has been generally accepted by the Church as the more correct model since at least the mid-\\\'70s, when it appeared as the only model in teaching materials like \\\"Ancient America Speaks\\\", though again the Church has no official position on exactly where the events of the Book of Mormon narrative took place. There are actually several versions of the \\\"Limited Geography\\\" model as well - Meso-America is simply the most popular.
The Church, by the way, does not claim that the Mayans were Jews. The Mayan pre-classical civilization is approximately the right time period and possibly the right place, but the classical Mayan civilization would have been after the narrative of the Book of Mormon had concluded, making it inaccurate to claim that the Mayans were the Lehites/Nephites/Lamanites.
