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Originally Posted by Iluvatar
We know more about the ancient inhabitants of this continent than one might think.
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Allow me to restate myself. I don't mean to say we know so little. The amount of information we know about ancient americans is impressive. The amount that we DON'T know is overwhelming.
This is the big issue with history. Look at the history of the LDS Church, for example. It took place entirely within the previous 200 years, involved mostly people who speak our own language, & transpired in our own country. Despite all this, very few of the aspects of our history are truly indisputable. You can gather one hundred different historians seeking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to analyze the life of Joseph Smith and get one hundred different Joseph Smiths. To make things worse, we have people on both sides of the debate twisting facts to better fit their own arguments. Even studying available resources will never completely cover everything, because of how many first hand sources A) have been lost, and B) never were. Joseph himself never put to paper many of his sacred experiences, such as the latter details of the first vision (JS--H 1:20), leading him to make the famous statement: "You don't know me, you never knew my heart. No man knows my history; I cannot write it, I shall never undertake it."
History is difficult enough dealing with our own era, language, and terrain. Now slip back a millenium or two and see how well our history holds up. We'll make things easier by sticking with the most familiar ancient society: Rome. The Roman alphabet, language, and society heavily influence their modern day counterparts. We have so many surviving artifacts and documents that we can identify the major players of Rome and get a good idea of how things happened in the Roman Empire. But again, we are plagued by the same lack of information. We have even fewer historical documents that have survived to the modern day-- in fact, most of what we know regarding the first ten or so emperors comes from one historian, Tacitus. Bias in writing becomes even more problematic, and to this day historians argue about how much correction is merited in adjusting for it.
Now we really muck things up by talking about a people who not only lived two thousand years ago, but have a language that has been lost, a writing we can't fully interpret, and a history we can't reveal. We have access to some private thoughts of Joseph Smith, and some words of Julius Caesar. We don't even have names for important leaders of pre-columbian leaders. If it were not for perpetuated legends we would have only artifacts, which tell the story of the persons who used them and little more. When you compare what we know about ancient america to early america or even ancient Rome, the amount is rather small to say the least.
This is why the Book of Mormon can't be historically proven or disproven; there's just not enough physical evidence to say one way or the other. It simply depends on whether you interpret a blank canvas as suppressing nothing, or suggesting nothing.
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Originally Posted by Iluvatar
There is really no way that one can continue to believe that the Lamanites are "the primary ancestors of the american indians" and remain intellectually honest and academically informed. The mental gymnastics one has to perform to satisfactorally explain the overwhelming body of evidence to the contrary is exhausting.
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There's nothing wrong with the Lamanites not being the "primary" ancestors of the American Indians, if by "primary" you mean that over 50% of their ancestry is of Lehite origin. But there's nothing prohibiting traces of the blood of Lehi from spreading the face of the western hemisphere.