Could Lehis Genes Vanish Without a Trace?
Norse migrations to the Americas are instructive in dealing with the Book of Mormon, for they show that it is possible for major migrations to a new land to occur, persist for centuries, and then go into oblivion, much as happened for the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. The non-LDS scholar Dr. James Dixon makes several related points about the Norse in his 1993 book Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (pp. 130-132, as cited by Sorenson, pp. 8,9). He states that the Norse settlement in Vinland “demonstrates that various groups of humans could have attempted colonization of the American continents . . . only to subsequently disappear” while “evidence of their passing would be extremely difficult to detect in the archaeological record.” Speaking of the extensive and long-lasting (about 500 years long) Norse settlement in Greenland, Dixon notes that Norse genes could have been mixed with native Greenland populations (Inuits or “Eskimos”), masking their European genetic ties. As a
