Is the Israelite Lehi the father of the Polynesians?

  "We express gratitude that to these fertile Islands Thou didst guide descendants of Father Lehi." 

—New Zealand Temple dedicatory prayer, 1958

Mormon Folklore

Mormons believe that Polynesians are a branch of the House of Israel that sprouted from the descendants of Lehi, an Israelite who the Book of Mormon claims sailed to the Americas in 600BC. Mormon folklore links the Book of Mormon sailor Hagoth (descendant of Lehi who lived in 54 BC), with the colonization of the Pacific. Hagoth was an “exceedingly curious” Nephite who built very large ships that were launched into the West Sea. These ships transported large numbers of Nephite men, women, and children and their provisions to lands northward (Alma 63:5). Many Mormons believe that some of these ships got lost and landed in the islands of the Pacific.

Unlike most Mormon theology, which travels from the prophet down, this remarkable Polynesian-Israelite belief appears to have traveled in a reverse direction, emerging first among missionaries serving in the Pacific. Joseph Smith made no recorded statements related to this belief, and in Mormon scriptures we find no explicit statement in its favor.  In 1858 prophetic approval was bestowed on the speculation when Brigham Young declared,

“Those islanders, and the natives of this country are of the House of Israel, of the seed of Abraham”

—Douglas 1974

In 1911 the First Presidency claimed

“The Lord ... directed their course away from this continent [America] to their island homes, that they might not be left to be preyed upon and destroyed by the more wicked part of the House of Israel whose descendants still roam upon this continent in a fallen and degraded state”

—Joseph F. Smith, Anthon H. Lund, and John Henry Smith 

Unlike the Polynesians, the inhabitants of the western isles of the Pacific bore an unsettling resemblance to members of the African race, who according to other LDS revelation had inherited a harsh racial curse from God. Eastern Polynesians were thought to possess the fair complexion of the…

“original [Lehite] stock,” while “Figi [sic] ... Islanders, the New Zealanders, the inhabitants of New Caledonia and the New Hebrides … have greatly mixed with the Australian race or with the Negroes of New Guinea and the Philipine [sic] Islands.”

—Juvenile Instructor, 1868

Consequently, Melanesia and Micronesia had virtually no contact with Mormon missionaries for the next century until the curse was redefined as applicable only to people who were of African descent. But in the early history of the church, missionaries were kept away from Fiji, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and the Caroline and Solomon Islands. The influence of racial theology is clearly seen in LDS proselyting patterns in the Pacific (figure). Missionaries first reached Polynesia in 1843 and had visited all the major Polynesian groups by the end of the nineteenth century. Serious efforts to proselyte in Melanesia and Micronesia began in the 1950s, with a rapid expansion occurring toward the end of the 1970s. The church officially started baptizing Fijians and other Melanesians after missionaries consulted with anthropologists at the Fiji museum on Suva Island; Melanesians were judged to be racially distinct from Negroes (Gordon 1988). The two Polynesian groups not visited until the twentieth century both have very small populations of about 2,000.

Scientific View of Pacific Colonization

Archaeological evidence

“It is extraordinary that the same nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this vast Ocean from New Zealand to this Island which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe.”

—Captain James Cook, Easter Island, 1774 

The close genetic ties between Polynesians were clearly evident to European sailors from the outset. But did their ancestors come from Southeast Asia or did they come from the Americas? All of the (abundant) scientific evidence points west towards Southeast Asia. 

The archaeological evidence suggests that there were three major waves of Pacific settlement. The first phase resulted in the colonization of Australia between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago (Roberts et al. 1990, Thorne et al. 1999). By 30,000 years ago, the original settlers had spread throughout most of the Australian continent. More recent waves of immigration from Papua New Guinea probably occurred as recently as 6,000 years ago. One group brought domestic dogs, which gave rise to the dingo, a wild dog found on mainland Australia.

In the next phase the Melanesian islands in the Bismarck Archipelago and the Northern Solomons were colonized between 6,000-15,000 years ago (Bellwood 1987). The settlers of western Micronesia are thought to have originated in Indonesia or the Philippines, while eastern Micronesia appears to have been settled from Melanesia, possibly Fiji.

The third and final phase of settlement (of Melanesia, parts of Micronesia, and much of Polynesia) was very rapid (Diamond 1988), taking about 2,000 years until complete in about AD 1000. These people shared a common language (Austronesian); strong evidence for a close genealogical link. The ancestors of the Polynesians spread a distinctively styled Lapita pottery, named after an archaeological site in New Caledonia where it was first described. Lapita pottery, with its striking geometric designs, has been found all the way from coastal Papua New Guinea eastward to Samoa (Bellwood 1979).

DNA evidence

Polynesians trace their molecular roots back to Asia. The first survey of Polynesian mitochondrial DNA found that most of the people they surveyed (90%) from the islands of Samoa, New Zealand, Niue, the Cook Islands, and Tonga had mitochondrial DNA belonging to the B lineage, which is common among Southeast Asians (Hertzberg et al. 1989). The general trend is one of a steady increase in the frequency of the B maternal lineage as one moves from Asia to the extremities of Polynesia.

The occurrence of the B lineage in the Pacific Islands and the Americas raises the question of recent common ancestry. The Asian, rather than American, origin is supported by the occurrence of unique mutations in Polynesian B lineage that are found in Southeast Asian B lineages but not in Native American B lineages (Sykes et al. 1995).

The distribution of the Polynesian maternal B lineage throughout the World is shown in the figure below. The most widely accepted homeland for the ancestors of the Polynesians is Taiwan, but the descendants of the original Polynesians mixed considerably with other populations and spread most of the way around the globe. The triangle indicates the extent of Polynesia. The discovery of the Polynesian lineage in the Malagasy from the island of Madagascar (Soodyall et al. 1995) is a striking testament to the maritime skills of the Polynesians.

Sources: Hertzberg et al. 1989, Lum et al. 1994, Lum and Cann 1998, Melton et al. 1995, Murray-McIntosh et al. 1998, Soodyall et al. 1995, Stoneking and Wilson 1989, Sykes et al. 1995.

Rosalind Murray-McIntosh of Massey University, New Zealand, believes the DNA evidence strongly suggests that there were a significant number of females in the canoes when the Polynesians colonized New Zealand. Based on the variation found in the B lineages of the Maoris she estimates that between 50 and 100 women sailed in the colonizing group(s) (Murray-McIntosh et al. 1998). This strongly suggests that the settlement of New Zealand was planned and that it involved numerous boats and possibly multiple voyages.

A detailed examination of 655 Polynesian maternal lineages in 1995 revealed that about 6 percent do not belong to the B lineage family (Sykes et al. 1995). Most are related to lineages found among people from Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. This is compatible with a colonization history of small groups of skilled seafarers who island-hopped through Southeast Asia and Melanesia, mixing with coastal populations. The remaining 2 percent of Polynesian lineages were similar to Filipino lineages and others appeared to come from western Europe, most likely the United Kingdom.

The accumulated molecular research strongly supports a Polynesian genealogy leading back exclusively to Asia. As one moves away from Asia through the Pacific Islands to the most distant islands of New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island, the number of DNA lineages decreases. Immigration from America would have increased the number of female lineages near the New World. Rather, the trend is consistent with an eastward migration of small founding groups that colonized the islands in succession, each new colonization resulting in a reduced number of maternal DNA lineages among those taking possession of the newly discovered island. The Maoris of New Zealand illustrates the endpoint of this trend, where virtually all individuals posses the Polynesian B lineage.

References

Bellwood, Peter S. 1979. Man’s Conquest of the Pacific: The Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania. New York: Oxford University.

Bellwood, Peter S. 1987. The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People, rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Diamond, Jared M. 1988. “Express Train to Polynesia,” Nature 336:307-08.

Douglas, Norman. 1974. “The Sons of Lehi and the Seed of Cain: Racial Myths in Mormon Scripture and Their Relevance to the Pacific Islands, Journal of Religious History 8:90-104.

Gordon, Tamar. 1988. Inventing Mormon Identity in Tonga, Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley.

Hertzberg, Mark, K. M. Mickleson, S. W. Serjeantson, et al. 1989. “An Asian-Specific 9-bp Deletion of Mitochondrial DNA Is Frequently Found in Polynesians,” American Journal of Human Genetics 44:504-10.

Lum, J. Koji, and Rebecca Luisa Cann. 1998. “MtDNA and Language Support a Common Origin of Micronesians and Polynesians in Island Southeast Asia,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 105:109-19.

Lum, J. Koji, Olga Rickards, C. Ching, et al. 1994. “Polynesian Mitochondrial DNAs Reveal Three Deep Maternal Lineage Clusters,” Human Biology 66:567-90.

Melton, Terry, R. Peterson, A. J. Redd, et al. 1995. “Polynesian Genetic Affinities with Southeast Asian Populations as Identified by MtDNA Analysis,” American Journal of Human Genetics 57:403-14.

Murray-McIntosh, Rosalind P., Brian J. Scrimshaw, Peter J. Hatfield, et al. 1998. “Testing Migration Patterns and Estimating Founding Population Size in Polynesia by Using Human MtDNA Sequences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95:9047-52.

Roberts, Richard G., R. Jones, and M. A. Smith. 1990. “Thermoluminescence Dating of a 50,000-Year-Old Human Occupation Site in Northern Australia,” Nature 345:153-6.

Soodyall, Himla, Trefor Jenkins, and Mark Stoneking. 1995. “‘Polynesian’ MtDNA in the Malagasy,” Nature Genetics 10:377-78.

Stoneking, Mark, and Allan C. Wilson. 1989. “Mitochondrial DNA,” in The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail, eds. Adrian V. S. Hill and Susan W. Serjeantson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sykes, Bryan, A. Leiboff, J. Low-Beer, et al. 1995. “The Origins of the Polynesians: An Interpretation from Mitochondrial Lineage Analysis,” American Journal of Human Genetics 57:1463-75.

Thorne, Alan, Rainer Grün, Graham Mortimer, et al. 1999. “Australia’s Oldest Human Remains: Age of the Lake Mungo 3 Skeleton,” Journal of Human Evolution 36:591-612.