That said, I don't really care all that much where the Book of Mormon takes place. While I certainly have an opinion on it, and the more I study it, the more my opinion is reinforced, if it turns out that I'm completely wrong, well... I won't really care all that much, and it's not like my testimony of the Book of Mormon will be affected. In any case, I don't want to talk too much about it, but here's a youtube video that adds more to the discussion than I have done.
I am a little bit concerned--although it's not my problem to solve, and I don't want to impinge on the agency of proponents of either theory by telling them what they should say or think--by the heat with which some Heartlanders approach their model, though, which state that because Joseph Smith clearly advocated the Heartland model and that lack of acceptance of it is tantamount to apostasy. And the Meso-Americans have started responding with similar vitriol; claiming that the Heartlanders are claiming that the Church itself is out of touch with Joseph Smith and therefore, they are the semi-apostates. That's not really true, of course; neither of those, actually, but it doesn't have any impact on my belief that the Heartland model is a better model than the Meso-American model. The behavior of proponents of either is not evidence of anything.
Unfortunately, and maybe this was something that God allowed to happen by design, the nature of the early expansion of the Americans across the continent, and their farming techniques, coming as they did before the real advent of archaeology and paleontology, means that there is little scientific consensus about many of the things that farmers reported finding as they plowed their fields and tore up mounds, etc. There's actually a great deal of evidence, reports, and witnesses for a lot of stuff that science does not support, including archaeological finds related to the Hopewell complex in particular. As the video above suggests, there was a concerted effort, related to Manifest Destiny and other ideas that make acceptance of evidence that is actually widespread difficult to accept. We've found tons of metal swords in the Midwest? Iconography that resembles Middle Eastern and even specifically Israelite stuff? Well, that contradicts our ideas, so it's dismissed. After all, if the Indians were the post-apocalyptic descendants of a higher culture, that could very well interfere with the beliefs in the Manifest Destiny of the Americans to spread across the largely empty lands that the remnant of these other peoples still lived on.
The same thing goes with the notion of the Pleistocene extinction event. There is all kinds of evidence that suggests that many of our ideas are wrong. Mammoths and mastodons still being found and described to Americans by the Indians in the 1700s. The Sioux insisting that their horses are not the descendants of Spanish horses, but a lineage that they'd had for generations. (They were all killed by the US government, so no genetic research can be done anymore. Plus, the whole thing doesn't really add up; the Plains Indians were supposed to have become among the best light cavalry with a horse-centric culture only a couple of generations after stumbling across a few feral Spanish horses, and figuring out what to do with them on their own? That doesn't make any sense.) I strongly suspect that most of the extinct animals were not extinct as early as our paleontologists tell us and many of these animals; maybe even most of them, lingered beyond the 8,000 BC mark, well into the modern era and as Americans we literally just barely missed seeing them alive. There may well have been early frontiersman, trappers and whatnot who did see them alive, but of course, they didn't bring evidence back to Yale or Harvard or other places who published scientific data, so now our so-called elite scientific minds don't accept them as accurate or even possible.
In fact, curiously, if you start digging into it, there has been a very concerted effort among academia to discredit all kinds of evidence that would corroborate the Book of Mormon narrative in the American Midwest. Even when the individuals in academia wouldn't necessarily have known that that's what they were doing. The Great Deceiver has been very active making sure that there is doubt, so that the righteous have to exercise some faith to accept the Narrative given to us by our Father. If anything, to me, this is a kind of confirmation that I wasn't even expecting to find, but is compelling nonetheless--the fact that Satan is trying very hard to hide and cover up this evidence is itself evidence that we're on to something interesting here.
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So anyway, if that's true, the Jaredite scripture that references horses and elephants and cureloms and cumoms is entirely plausible. There were American lineages of horses in America, and they probably did survive into Book of Mormon times and even beyond, possibly even all the way into the late 1800s. The "Columbian Mammoth" should really be more accurately called the "American Elephant" as it is more closely related to the Asian Elephant than even the African Elephants are. But the question remains; what is a curelom and what is a cumom? They were either animals not known to the Nephites, or at least Moroni who wrote the Book of Ether from Jaredite records, or they weren't known to Joseph Smith, so he didn't have an English word to translate that he knew.
Ether 9:16 And the Lord began again to take the curse from off the land, and the house of Emer did prosper exceedingly under the reign of Emer; and in the space of sixty and two years they had become exceedingly strong, insomuch that they became exceedingly rich—It's not clear if the cureloms and cumoms were "useful unto man" or "useful for the food of man;" i.e., did they use them as domesticated work animals, or did they just eat them? There's no way to know what animals they were, or even if they were animals that were used more for hunting or as livestock as opposed to working animals. There are a number of proposals put out there by a number of members, but they all are based on making unverified and unverifiable assumptions, and then treating these assumptions as if they were fact; i.e., that the animals have to have been the most useful for work, etc., therefore, proboscideans are to be favored because they are more useful than other animals as beasts of burden and construction (see the use of elephants in India and southeast Asia even today, for example.) In any case, if they already had "elephants" than additional proboscideans shouldn't necessarily be useful rather than redundant; although I think that the other proboscidians are still very valid and likely candidates, but they aren't necessarily to be preferred to other animals that could have been referenced.
17 Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things;
18 And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man.
19 And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.
By the same token, I think it's important to mention that the cureloms and cumoms were almost certainly animals that were unique to North America, because Old World animals were well known in American culture already, and would almost certainly not have been left untranslated. By this same token, it probably wasn't a North American animal that Joseph Smith himself would probably have known quite well. We know that Joseph Smith's translation was a revelatory process, not a worldly one. He didn't sit down with a dictionary of Nephite to English; he had the meaning of the text revealed to him directly. In this regard, some animals that otherwise might be candidates can probably be eliminated from consideration. For example, if the Jaredites did live in the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region and southern Canada, as the Heartland model proposes, then the beaver would probably have been greatly useful to them, because warm clothing could have been made from its pelts, as trappers and Indians alike did during the Colonial period. Even if, as the Heartland folks opine, the climate was warmer during the Book of Mormon years than now, coinciding with the Roman Warm Period for the Nephite flowering and the Bronze Age Optimum that would have been in place during the time of the Jaredites. I doubt that this was uniformly true, however. The Book of Mormon spans many centuries; although the timing of the beginning of the Jaredite era is a bit uncertain, it likely spans at least two thousand years, if not another half millennium more even. No warm period in history has lasted this long without oscillations between warm and cool. I don't think the Jaredites, if they lived in the area around the Great Lakes, would have had uniformly warmer weather than we do now, since we also live in another relatively warm period comparable to the Roman Warm Period right now.
In any case, I digress. I believe the best candidate are among the megafauna, or large-bodied animals that were native to North America, and which are assumed incorrectly by science to have all gone extinct around 8,000 BC. Some, at least, of them had to have lingered to have been listed by Moroni's summary of the Jaredites as horses, asses, elephants, cureloms and cumoms. What are the candidates?
- Giant sloths; various species from about black bear sized to nearly elephant sized in North America. I doubt these were domesticable, but you never know, and maybe they were a great source of meat, at least, if nothing else. I also think they are unlikely because their remains are almost exclusively found in the southern reaches of North America, and the Jaredites didn't utilize the land southward for most of the span of their history. Of course, if you don't accept the Heartland geographical model (certainly grist for another post) then that objection is removed, and they remain in play as a possibility.
- Several species of tapir, including one that lived at least as far north as Missouri. I think this is also probably too far south for the Heartland model to be in play, but otherwise it's a good candidate, and there are, in fact, some ancient stone carvings that seem to indicate possibly domesticated tapirs at some point by South American indians.
- Several species of peccaries, including species larger than today's peccaries. I don't know that these were ever domesticated, and if they were, it's certainly possible that that's what were described as swine in the list of animals, although technically peccaries aren't really exactly swine.
- Saiga are a possibility, as they lived in North America. Although they are an Old World animal as well, it's not likely that Joseph Smith was familiar with them, and therefore wouldn't have been able to translate it into an English word, as there was no widespread English word in use in his era. While the saiga have been important to populations in the past; the Andronovo culture and the Scythians used them intensively, although they probably hunted them rather than domesticated them as livestock. In addition, it probably lived even further North in North America relative to the Jaredites to have been very common among them. This is a very distant possibility.
- There were two species of North American llamas, the "big headed llama" and the "stilt-legged llama." They aren't really well known from the Great Lakes region, but a bit further south and especially west, but they may have been more broadly distributed than the finds now indicate. Given how useful the extant llamas are in South America, this would be a decent candidate.
- There is also a North American species of camel, called Camelops, but unless it looked significantly different than Old World camels, it probably would have been translated as camel rather than untranslated.
- A number of native bovine species; two types of buffalo, the shrub-ox, and Harlan's musk-ox. I suspect that Joseph Smith would have translated bison rather than left it untranslated, and I also suspect that the other animals, if they were domesticated, can probably be wrapped up in the list above as the various cattle, cows and oxen. There isn't any indication that Old World cattle were still in North America, so I prefer to suspect that that listing is referring to native animals among this list, in particular the shrub-ox and the very widspread Harlan's musk-ox.
- I doubt that the stag-moose was domesticated, or that it would have been listed in this list if the actual moose and other deer were not listed. Likewise, the numerous species of antelope related to the pronghorn antelope today are not likely to have been listed. In fact, none of the animals listed seem to have been animals that were hunted, and it's possible that the Jaredites weren't big hunters period. Or maybe they simply didn't list animals that were hunted in this scripture because it was meant to list specifically animals that were kept by the Jaredites rather than hunted by them. However, in the same chapter that lists these animals, it refers to the herds being driven by poisonous serpents into the land southward, without any herders, so it's possible that the Jaredites kept a number of semi-domesticated livestock that they hunted. But I think all of these are unlikely.
- A number of large armadillos, including the glyptodont, all probably lived too far south to be known to the Jaredites.
- The Columbian mammoth, as mentioned above, is probably the "elephant." That said, good candidates include the American mastodon, which would have looked like an elephant, but also sufficiently different that anyone at a glance would not confuse it with one, and Cuvieronius, a gomphothere, or elephant relative, that had very different proportions than the mammoth and mastodon both. Stegomastodon was another gomphothere
- The giant beaver. I earlier ruled out that regular beaver, but the giant beaver was much larger; weighing several hundred pounds, and was especially concentrated in the Great Lakes area, and if one accepts the Heartland model, was almost certainly known to the Jaredites. The giant beaver probably did not build dams or create beaver ponds like the extant beaver. But again; I doubt they were domesticated.
I suppose after going through the list, I'm leaning heavily towards assuming that the American mastodon and Cuvieronius are by far the most likely candidates to be cureloms and cumoms. In fact, I think almost every other potential candidate is ruled out as unlikely for various reasons. As an aside, again utilizing the Heartland model, the mastodon was a forest-dwelling animal normally, and is well known from the Great Lakes region in particular, while Cuvieronius is normally known from locations just a little further south.
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Finally, since we're talking about the Jaredites, what about the notion that they may have been black? I first though that idea was kind of crazy when I first heard it (from a black instructor in my high priests group a number of years ago), but some of the Heartland guys, or at least Wayne May, believes it, and there's a book published out there that promotes this idea as well (I have not read it, I admit, nor am I interested in doing so. I have read a brief summary by the author of some of the lines of evidence used to support his thesis, though.) I do not, although I don't rule it out as impossible, just very highly unlikely. Let's examine the evidence used to bolster this claim, and I suspect you'll agree with me that it is mostly specious.
The first time this notion was proposed was, I believe, in relation to the Kinderhook plates. These were some plates allegedly found by a farmer a bit south of Nauvoo in a place called Kinderhook, which were associated with a giant skeleton burial. The story is that they were found and brought to Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith looked at them briefly, said he'd attempt a translation, said that a small portion of them were translated as saying that the guy was a descendant of Ham. But no further translation ever appeared, and the episode ending up fading out of the public consciousness of the members of the Church. When they first showed up, naturally they excited a great deal of interest, and wild speculation and rumors were flying around Nauvoo about what they may be.
In any case, this idea that this alleged Jaredite skeleton was a descendant of Ham is where the notion that the Jaredites were black got started; Ham being allegedly the ancestor of black people, according to interpretations of the book of Genesis. However, the Kinderhook plates are almost certainly forgeries. The person who brought them to Nauvoo admitted it later in life. One of the plates still survives and its location is known, and it's been analysed forensically; the findings are consistent with the forgers story that they etched it with acid themselves as a hoax or "frontier joke"; or more maliciously, an iteration of the same trap that Martin Harris' people tried to foist on Joseph Smith with the stolen 116 pages. In addition, it's also unlikely that Joseph Smith ever tried to translate anything, or made any comment about anybody being a descendant of Ham. Reports that he did so are almost certainly reports of gossip, rumors and speculation that was flying all around Nauvoo at the time that the plates made their dramatic entrance into town. The Church has issued a short statement about the affair, which seems to discount them.
But let's assume for the sake of argument that they are actually genuine and valid, and that the translation that the Jaredite was a descendant of Ham through his son Pharaoh of Egypt. The descendants of Ham mentioned in the Bible are not black. Nations reported to be descended from Ham include the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, etc. none of whom are black. The Jaredites come from Babylon (Babel) which is far from sub-Saharan Africa, and no black people are reported ever having been native to the area. In fact, the area is a stronghold and even historical seats of Semitic people, i.e. descendants of Shem, not Ham. This is strong evidence that even if the Kinderhook material is valid, it still doesn't say, or even support, the idea that the Jaredites were black.
Another line of evidence, which is really just very poor and specious speculation and wishful thinking tied and connected to additional poor and specious speculation and presented as if it were fact is in regards to the Olmecs. There really isn't any reason to associate the Olmecs with the Jaredites unless you also accept the equally specious idea that the Pre-classical Mayas can be associated specifically with the Nephites. If this specious (and unlikely, in my opinion) correspondence were true, then the Olmecs would indeed be an attractive candidate to propose as a possible Jaredite archaeological culture.
And this is another possible source of the idea that the Jaredites were black, because there is also an idea that the Olmecs were black. This is based on the idea that the large stone heads associated with the Olmec people look to some as if they represent the facial features of sub-Saharan, black Africans. This is not, however, taken seriously by anyone who doesn't have some kind of ax to grind about trying to attribute some kind of high culture or magnificent discovery or colonialism to black people. As many have pointed out, there are still native peoples (not black) in the Yucatan who look almost exactly like these Olmec heads. Plus, the Olmecs heads have some kind of head plates on them that look like old-fashioned leather football helmets, the Olmecs are sometimes believed to have invented the infamous ball game that was famously used by the Maya in later years, and black people today are really good at football, or something?
Really, the evidence that the Jaredites were black is completely non-existent. It amounts to the combination of a hoax, some rumors, an unfounded bit of racial chauvinistic wild speculation and wishful thinking. That doesn't mean that it's impossible that the Jaredites were black, just that it seems unlikely in the extreme and there is literally no credible reason at all to believe that they were. And in fact it is perpetuated for bad reasons, in my opinion. I don't know how many times that I see people in the Church who believe that who latch on to it as evidence for their non-racism; see, look, the members of the Church were proposing that black people had the most advanced civilization in the world at one point in the past; nobody else believed that, especially in the 1800s! This is Phariseeism and virtue-signaling, and if anything, is evidence that suggests you should not take seriously anything else anyone who does that says on the subject, as they are clearly neither objective nor serious.
Personally, I don't believe that the Jaredites were black at all. I believe that they were basically a Mesopotamian people who left in the pre-Akkadian age, crossed central and eastern Asia through some route (although perhaps they went south from Mesopotamia instead of east northeast, and that a much better putative archaeological horizon to the Olmecs is to be found in the Adena Mound-builder horizon; although that doesn't seem sufficient to completely encapsulate the Jaredites either. I also believe that the Jaredites may well have not arrived in a completely empty land (the Nephites and Lamanites either, for that matter.) Just because the narrative thread of the Book of Mormon can be interpreted that way doesn't mean that it's true. Absence of reference to other peoples is not evidence of absence of other peoples, and the Church itself has recently (well, relatively speaking) the Introduction of the Book of Mormon to suggesting that rather than the Lamanites being the primary ancestors of the American Indians, being merely among the ancestors of the American Indians.
