Response: Anachronisms — Horses, Steel, Wheat, and Elephants

The anachronism list is the CES Letter’s most rhetorically powerful section — and its most quietly dishonest. At every single item, Jeremy Runnells faced a fork: the simplistic reading, or the nuanced, historically-grounded one that the actual evidence supports. Every time, he chose the simplistic path — and then pre-emptively dismissed the better answer as “manipulated definitions” so his readers would never look at it.

CES Letter

“These animals, crops, metals, and technologies did not exist in pre-Columbian America during Book of Mormon times (2200 BC – 421 AD): horses, cattle, oxen, sheep, swine, goats, elephants, wheels, chariots, wheat, and silk.”

CES Letter

“Unofficial apologists claim victories in some of these items but closer inspection reveals significant problems, including manipulated definitions where steel is not steel, sheep become never-domesticated bighorn sheep, horses become tapirs.”

Notice exactly what the second quotation does. Jeremy does not engage the scholarship on translation; he inoculates his reader against it in advance. The phrase “manipulated definitions” is designed to make the reader feel that any nuance is cheating — so that the moment a faithful scholar explains semantic range or loan-shifting, the doubting reader will hear only weaseling. That is the trick. And it only works if you never learn what the words “translation” and “anachronism” actually mean to the historians who use them for a living.

Here is the fork. On one road stands the simplistic reading: a word in a 19th-century English translation must denote precisely the single modern zoological or metallurgical species an English reader first pictures; if the archaeology of one region at one moment has not yet produced that exact species, the record is a forgery. On the other road stands the nuanced reading used by every working translator of every ancient text: a translated word carries a semantic range, ancient peoples named unfamiliar things by their nearest familiar equivalent (loan-shifting), and the absence of a find in a barely-excavated hemisphere is not the presence of a disproof.

Every professional Assyriologist, classicist, and biblical scholar walks the second road — it is simply how translation is done. Jeremy chose the first. And the irony he never tells his reader is this: the “manipulation” runs the other direction. It is Jeremy who manipulates the definition — freezing each word to its narrowest possible modern meaning and forbidding it the semantic breadth that language has always had. He took the lesser inference not because the evidence pointed there, but because the lesser inference is the only one that yields his conclusion. Item by item, the record shows he had the better road available and declined it. This same move — pile up a long list of items and count on volume to substitute for depth — is examined across the whole section in The Kitchen Sink Attack.

1. Horses: The Most Contested Anachronism

The standard consensus holds that the horse (Equus caballus) went extinct in the Americas roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago and was not reintroduced until the Spanish. Jeremy presents this as a closed case. It is not, and a fuller treatment of the animal appears in Horses in the Book of Mormon and in the doctrinal survey Horses in the Book of Mormon.

Holocene survival evidence. A growing body of finds suggests horses survived in limited pockets into the Holocene. Horse remains from the Yucatán’s Loltun Cave have been recovered from strata far above the supposed extinction horizon, and pre-contact equid bone has surfaced at several sites (Wade Miller and Matthew Roper, “Animals in the Book of Mormon: Challenges and Responses,” BYU Studies 56:4, 2017). The dating is contested — but “contested” is precisely not the clean, settled extinction Jeremy needs.

Loan-shifting is documented, not invented. When the Spanish arrived with horses, Aztec speakers reached for their existing word for deer — the largest animal in their experience that filled the same role. This is the ordinary mechanics of naming the unfamiliar. If an ancient author used his nearest term for an animal that functioned as a horse does, and a translator rendered it “horse,” that is not fraud; it is translation. Jeremy calls this “horses become tapirs” and expects the reader to laugh. But the principle is identical to the one scholars use without controversy for every other ancient text — he simply refuses it here because it costs him his conclusion.

The record excludes itself from the census. Mormon states in Words of Mormon 1:5 that he cannot write “a hundredth part” of his people’s history. The book never claims to be a zoological inventory of two continents — a point developed in The Book of Mormon Never Claimed to Be a Complete American History. Non-discovery in a hemisphere where a fraction of a percent of sites have been excavated is not disproof.

2. Steel: The Objection That the Archaeology Already Overturned

Here Jeremy’s simplistic path is not merely weaker — on the Old World claim it is simply out of date. The Book of Mormon describes Laban’s sword with a blade of “most precious steel” near 600 BC (1 Nephi 4:9). Jeremy insists steel did not exist then. The archaeology says otherwise.

Carburized iron — steel — in Iron Age Israel. Excavated blades from the Levant, including a carburized iron sword recovered near Jericho and other artifacts studied metallurgically, show deliberately steeled iron in the exact region and century of Lehi’s family. This is not an apologetic redefinition; it is laboratory metallography on real objects. The full case is laid out in Laban’s Steel Sword — Iron Age Jerusalem Vindicates the Book of Mormon. Jeremy’s “steel is not steel” retort inverts reality: metallurgists call carburized iron steel, and they did the carburizing in Lehi’s Jerusalem.

Tumbaga and the plates. The record describes metal plates gold in appearance yet light enough for one man to carry. Tumbaga — a gold-copper alloy worked throughout pre-Columbian Mesoamerica — is exactly that: golden, markedly lighter than pure gold, highly workable, used for ceremonial objects. Its existence is undisputed and sits in dozens of museums, and its properties fit the description better than pure gold ever could.

Jaredite steel. The Jaredites are described with steel weapons in a much earlier era — a period for which Old World evidence is likewise sparse but not absent. Whether steeled iron reached the Americas through the trans-oceanic contact the Jaredite narrative describes is a genuine open question, not a settled negative. Notice the honesty differential: the faithful reading marks this as open; Jeremy’s reading marks it as closed against the record on evidence that does not close it.

3. Wheat and Barley: The Ground Moved Under the Objection

The Book of Mormon lists wheat and barley among Nephite crops (Mosiah 9:9). When earlier critics raised this, it looked like a clean anachronism.

Pre-Columbian barley, found in the ground. Beginning in the 1980s, archaeologists working Hohokam sites in the American Southwest recovered domesticated Hordeum pusillum — native little barley — in firmly pre-Columbian contexts. A cultivated grain that any English speaker would reasonably call barley was being farmed in the pre-Columbian New World. Science reported this in secular venues years before it helped anyone’s apologetics. The confident “barley was impossible” claim did not survive the trowel.

Grain names travel by nearest equivalent. A 19th-century translator rendering an ancient Mesoamerican grain term as “wheat” is doing exactly what translators do — the same loan-shifting that gave the Aztecs “deer” for horse. This is the nuanced path Jeremy waved away in advance as manipulation, and it is simply the linguistics of the situation.

4. Elephants: A Detail That Fits the Timeline He Flattened

Elephants appear in exactly one place: Ether 9:19, in the earliest Jaredite era. Jeremy files “elephants” on the same undifferentiated list as horses and wheat, as though all belong to the same period. They do not, and the distinction is fatal to his flattening.

American mastodons and mammoths — the elephants of the Americas — persisted into the Holocene, and isolated proboscidean populations survived far later than the textbook extinction headline suggests (in the Old World, the Wrangel Island mammoths endured to roughly 2000 BC). The Book of Ether opens near the dispersion from Babel — the oldest layer of the oldest narrative, the horizon closest to the tail of proboscidean survival. A single elephant reference, confined to that earliest Jaredite stratum, is not the blunder Jeremy’s flattened list implies; its whole force depends on the timeline he compressed, and it reads very differently once that timeline is restored.

5. The Epistemology Beneath It All: Absence Is Not Disproof

Every item on Jeremy’s list rests on one buried assumption: that our archaeological knowledge of the Americas is complete enough to rule things out. It is nowhere near it.

Before 1947, no one had seen the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before the 1970s, the Ebla tablets — hundreds of unknown cities, an unknown language — were invisible to scholarship. Since 2010, LiDAR has peeled back the jungle canopy to reveal pre-Columbian cities of a scale no one credited: the Maya center at Caracol maps larger than contemporary Rome, and Amazonian civilizations once dismissed as impossible now stand exposed in the survey data. Mesoamerican archaeology is young, and the overwhelming majority of its sites have never been touched by a trowel. A body of positive supporting evidence is surveyed in Book of Mormon Evidences.

The standard Jeremy silently applies — confirm every named item archaeologically or the text is fraudulent — is one no ancient document survives. We do not apply it to the Iliad, whose Troy was dismissed as myth until a merchant dug it up. We do not apply it to the Hebrew Bible, whose King David was “unattested” until the Tel Dan stele surfaced his dynasty. Jeremy reserves this uniquely destructive test for one book. That is not skepticism applied evenly; it is a standard reverse-engineered to reach a verdict already chosen.

Walk back through the fork. On steel, the archaeology has already vindicated the record in Lehi’s own region and century — here Jeremy is not merely on the weaker path, he is on the wrong side of published metallography. On barley, the ground literally moved: a domesticated New World grain now sits in the excavation reports. On elephants, restoring the timeline he flattened turns a supposed howler into a fitting detail. On horses, contested Holocene finds plus the ordinary mechanics of translation dissolve the certainty his argument requires. At every station, the nuanced, better-supported reading was available — and Jeremy chose the simplistic one and told his readers the better one was a cheat.

What is resolved: the steel objection collapses against Iron Age metallurgy; the barley objection collapses against Southwestern archaeology; the elephant objection loses its force once the Jaredite timeline is read honestly rather than flattened onto the Nephite era. What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open: the precise identity of the Book of Mormon “horse” and the route by which Jaredite steel reached the Americas. These are open questions of detail — the ordinary unfinished business of any ancient text still being excavated — not the fatal contradictions Jeremy sold them as. The record has not failed here. Its critic simply took the lesser road at every turn and hoped you would not notice the better one branching off beside him.

Further Study

• Horses in the Book of Mormon — Holocene survival evidence and the linguistics of loan-shifting, in full.
• Laban’s Steel Sword — Iron Age Jerusalem Vindicates the Book of Mormon — the metallography of carburized iron in Lehi’s Jerusalem.
• The Book of Mormon Never Claimed to Be a Complete American History — why the record’s own limits defeat the absence-of-evidence argument.
• The Kitchen Sink Attack — Every Bullet Point Answered — the volume-over-depth tactic that drives the whole anachronism list.
• Horses in the Book of Mormon — the doctrinal and scriptural survey of the horse question.
• Book of Mormon Evidences — the positive archaeological and textual case, gathered in one place.

Sources: Wade E. Miller & Matthew Roper, “Animals in the Book of Mormon: Challenges and Responses,” BYU Studies 56:4 (2017); John L. Sorenson, Mormon’s Codex (Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2013); Daniel Johnson, “Hard Evidences of Ancient America”; pre-Columbian Hordeum pusillum archaeobotanical records (Hohokam Southwest); metallurgical studies of carburized Iron Age Levantine blades; FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon.”