I notice that you have not dealt with the issues I raised in #363.
Your list is a bit faulty, but I understand your reasoning.
What is "faulty?"
The Maya did keep and collect honey from bees.
Sorry ... wrong insect, wrong "bee," you see ... Smith did not know the difference.
In Ether 2:3, it says that the Jaredites
"did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees."
The Mayans used Melipona beecheii, a stingless bee, for honey, but this is not the same as the true honey bee, which is of the genus Apis.
Bottom line: Big fail, no honey bees.
The Olmec fashioned meterite iron into little mirrors and other decorations.
But that is not the issue, the issue is that Smith describes a huge, iron based society, of which there is not evidence. The iron that has been found has been on the scale of trinkets, not iron or steel weapons, armor and implements:
2 Nephi 5:15 - And I did teach my people to build buildings, and to work in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores, which were in great abundance.
Bottom line: big fail, the "people" never worked in iron, brass or steel.
The Maya also kept peccaries in pens, and they were on the way to domestication.
No they were not "on the way to domestication." There were three reasons that the peccary was NEVER domesticated and never would be ("This leads to the question of why the Maya did not domesticate the peccary." - Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico, By Eugene Newton Anderson, Felix Medina Tzuc) : 1. The animals were so plentiful there was no need to domesticate them. 2. Unlike pigs that flourish on weeds, garbage and excrement, peccaries eat maize and complete directly with humans when food is short. 3. Peccaries produce fewer offspring than pigs, do not grow fast, and thus do not give the high return to labor that pigs do.
Bottom line, big fail, no one but a moron would ever confuse a peccary with a pig, and if they did ... they'd rue the day.
I don't know that the Book of Mormon ever mentions figs in a New World setting.
I don't either, I did not cull the BofM for each item I used a list that I had found: There are more than a dozen items and species mentioned in the BoM that have never existed in the New World, such as: coins, glass, Egyptian hieroglyphs, metal swords, functional wheels, chains, carriages, brass armor, chariots, wheat, figs, olives, grapes, barley, sheep, oxen, goats, asses, horses, bulls, elephants. So I'm happy to grant you the elimination of one out of a list of twenty-one items.
Bottom line: There are at least twenty items mentioned in the BofM that continue to be regarded as anachronisms and that require detailed explanation if the BofM is to be seen as a creditable source.
The Maya did have silk.
http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2232&context=etd They also had wooden swords, and cotton shields.
No, they did not have silk. The abstract of the dissertation that you cite reads:
ABSTRACT
This study documents silk production in Oaxaca, Mexico, and how the families and communities have changed and embraced new technology without sacrificing their culture, adapting to economic situations over time by changing their income sources. Because agriculture no longer generates a viable income, people have revived the production of silk. Many families plant produce for their own consumption and have another source of income in addition to the silk. However, many of the older women spoke of always having their main income from silk.
Silk has been a means of income in Oaxaca since silkworm graine was introduced by the Spanish in the 1500s. There have been times when silk production almost disappeared, but each time it was revived. The current expansion of silk production has been assisted by the Mexican government in its recognition of the importance of indigenous crafts. The government has implemented programs to assist organized silk producing groups by offering loans and grants to purchase equipment and hire teachers. The government supplies mulberry trees in the spring and silkworms twice a year to all individuals and families producing silk.
These hybrid silkworms spin larger cocoons that have more fiber than the criollo silkworm cocoons brought to the area by the Spanish, but almost all of the people still raise the criollo in addition to the hybrid. The only requirements for receiving silkworms is that the individual or group have enough trees to feed the silkworms and that they make a profit.
Most of the silk is woven into rebozos (shawls) with one or more members of the family involved in the spinning, weaving, and dyeing processes. Electric spinners and floor looms have been introduced by the government to enhance the spinning and weaving process, but many people, particularly the older women, still prefer to spin by hand using a malacate and weave using a backstrap loom. There are debates between the people as to which methods produce a better product. However, there is an agreement that it is better to
use natural dyes and the people in the communities have brought back this almost forgotten art.
Bottom line: Massive fail, misquote, misread, misrepresentation. Did you eve bother reading the abstract? ... "silkworm graine was introduced by
the Spanish in the 1500s."
The Book of Mormon never mentions magnetism.
The Liahona pointed towards food and water; it didn't point north. It was some sort of divination device.
No it does not, but it clearly identifies the Liahona as a "compass"
Alma 37:38 - And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the thing which our fathers call a ball, or director—or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it.
Bottom line: the BofM says it is a compass, if you want it to be some sort of supernatural do-dad ... fine, it is not required to make make my case.
Windows are windows, even without glass.
The Book of Mormon describes that the Jaredite people were familiar with the concept of "windows" near the time of the Biblical Tower of Babel (presumably circa 2000 BC. See Chronology of the Bible), and that they specifically avoided crafting windows for lighting in their covered seagoing vessels, because the windows would be "dashed in pieces" during the ocean voyage.[70] Transparent window panes are a more recent invention. The earliest known production of glass dates to 3500 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia, though the specimens are non-transparent beads.[71] The earliest known production of transparent glass panes is much more recent—dating to the 11th century AD in Germany. (wiki).
Bottom line: once again you strain credulity, but it is not required to make make my case so I will not waste time arguing about it.
Chariots don't need to have wheels to be chariots.
The Maya did use chariots or riding seats. There is ample evidence of that.
The Book of Mormon mentions the use of chariots as a mode of transportation five times.[58] There is no archaeological evidence to support the use of wheeled vehicles in Mesoamerica. Many parts of ancient Mesoamerica were not suitable for wheeled transport. Clark Wissler, the Curator of Ethnography at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, noted:
"we see that the prevailing mode of land transport in the New World was by human carrier. The wheel was unknown in pre-Columbian times."[59]
This affirmation, however, is not entirely correct. Wheels were used in a limited context in Mesoamerica for what were probably ritual objects, "small clay animal effigies mounted on wheels. Lack of suitable draft animals and a terrain unsuitable for wheeled traffic are the probable reasons that wheeled transport was never developed.[60][61] (wiki)
I love your approach here, it is the apologists' apology: chariots are not chariots. This is, perhaps, the most bizarre apologist stretch that you make, no one except a brainwashed believer would cotton to it ... but, again, it is not critical to my thesis ... so I'll let it go.
And barley was discovered in North American graves. Fullscreen | Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
Grains are mentioned twenty-eight times in the Book of Mormon, including barley and wheat.[49] The introduction of domesticated modern barley and wheat to the New World was made by Europeans sometime after 1492, many centuries after the time in which the Book of Mormon is set. (wiki)
Your citation reads, "Research on this matter supports two possible explanations. First, the terms barley and wheat, as used in the Book of Mormon, may refer to certain other New World crop plants that were given Old World designations; and second, the terms may refer to genuine varieties of New World barley and wheat." The author's religious bias is clearly seen since the third possible (probable?) explanation is not even considered, like so many other anachronisms in the BofM this is further evidence that Smith was making it up as he went along.
You need to provide a creditable reference to make your claim, an "Institute for Religious Scholarship" doesn't cut it when it comes to agronomy.
Bottom line, big fail, no creditable source for the presence of Barley in the pre-Colombian Americas, more support for Smith as a Liar.
There are several carvings or other dipictions of elephants in Mesoamerican art.
Elephants are mentioned twice in a single verse in the Book of Ether.[21] Mastodons and mammoths lived in the New World during the Pleistocene; however, as with the prehistoric horse, the fossil record indicates that they became extinct along with most of the megafauna towards the end of the last ice age. The source of this extinction is speculated to be the result of human predation, a significant climate change, or a combination of both factors.[22][23] It is known that a small population of mammoths survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska up until 5725 BP,[24] but even this date is thousands of years before the Jaredite record in the Book of Mormon begins. (wiki)
I think you are reading more into that clay figure than is there, it more closely resembles several large eared species of desert rodents than it does an elephant.
Bottom line: If you squint and wear bad glasses you might confuse that clay figurine as an elephant made by a rather unskilled artist. Besides, the image comes from a site that features articles such as, "Did LSD and Meditation Make Steve Jobs a Tech Visionary?" Not the sort of source I'd take very seriously .
Mayan history specifically states that they were Israelites who came from a place called Bountiful.
No, it doesn't and none but Mormon "archeologists" have made or support this claim.
Bottom line: massive fail, more apologetic disguised as science, the worst sort of lie.
The list of anachronisms has grown decidedly smaller over the intervening years.
It has? Care to document that with non-apologetic sources?
Your defenses simply aren't, they are, rather, excuses. Oh, no Smith did not mean (fill in the blank: honey bee, compass, steel, elephant, pig, horse, chariot, etc.) he meant something else. Now one or two of these sorts of apologies could be overlooked, but twenty or more? That's hardly creditable. When combined with the Mormon apologist lawyer comcusion between possibility and probability you reduce your entire defense to little more than a laughing stock. Who cares if there was a remnant mastodon population on Wrangle Island in Alaska, the Maya did not get there to see them. Also lost is the fact only one of the anachronisms need survive to destroy the entire work, but what is the probability (not possibility) of all the excuses being true ... remember that the "sum" of probabilities are multiplicative.
Even if each of the twenty anachronisms had as much as a one-in-ten probability of being real, taken together the probability of all of them being real (remember, all I need is one) is reduced to a number so small that it is on the order of 0.00000000000000000001. That is the probability of all your possibilities (well, that's actually a lot higher than it should be, since I'm stipulating a ridiculously high probability of one-in-ten), while the probability of just one being a lie and thus falsifying the entire work approaches a value of 1 (0.9999999999999999999), which is closer to absolute certainty than science ever requires.
