Raff and Bolnick

Does Mitochondrial Haplogroup X Indicate Ancient Trans-Atlantic Migration to the Americas? A Critical Re-Evaluation by Jennifer A. Raff and Deborah A. Bolnick.

quoting from the document below, with minor formatting (I added bullets)

Despite—or perhaps because of—this gap in the phylogeographic record for haplogroup X2, the presence of X2a in North America has been cited as evidence for two different trans-Atlantic migrations before European contact. First, Meldrum (2009) and Smoot et al. (2010) suggested that X2a is the result of an ancient Hebrew migration from the Middle East to North America approximately 2500 cal yr BP. This hypothesis is undermined, though, by four key findings:

  • X2a is not found in the Middle East
  • none of the X2 lineages present in the Middle East are immediately ancestral to X2a
  • the date of coalescence for X2a (14,200–17,000 cal yr BP) significantly precedes the hypothesized migration from the Middle East (Perego et al. 2009)
  • and haplogroup X2a was present in North America far earlier than the hypothesized Hebrew migration, having been found in the 8690–8400 cal yr BP Kennewick Man remains from Washington state (Rasmussen et al. 2015).

Thus, X2a does not provide any evidence for an ancient Hebrew migration from the Middle East to North America.

Ugo Perego confirms Bolnick

Ugo Perego, a believing LDS member, current institute director, and the foremost LDS expert on DNA markers and evolutionary genetics (author of 3 of the 5 papers on pubmed associated with haplogroup X2a), cites the above paper and also demonstrates why the data so convincingly suggests the X2a marker is best associated with a land-bridge migration and not any kind of direct Israel to the Americas transoceanic migration.

Ugo Perego: DNA and the Book of Mormon (Start at 1:24:00 and pay particular attention at 1:33:00)

FairMormon argues against haplogroup X2a

Question: Is DNA Haplogroup X2a proof that the Book of Mormon fits best in a geography located in the Great Lakes region?

… While interesting, at present it does not seem that haplogroup X can serve as good evidence of the Book of Mormon’s antiquity given the problems of dating and the failure of the model to come to grips with textual issues from the Book of Mormon. Doing so would require us to misrepresent the current state of scientific evidence. This claim also fails to interact responsibly with a fairly large body of literature which has led most LDS scholars to reject the Great Lakes region as a feasible match to the Book of Mormon’s requirements. …

See Also

Rodney Meldrum’s Haplogroup X Debunked (youtube video summary by The Mormon Informant)