When the Mormons Settled America

A sane person might not know this, but Mormons say the lost tribes of Israel came to America and basically reproduced all the Old Testament, you know, stone cities, steel weapons, all that litter archeologists find everywhere except here. Insane person Screaming Nephite**says

I have chatted with many anti-Mormons over the years, I find it a bit amusing how every single one of them magically turns into an expert on Pre-Columbian cultures the moment the subject of the Book of Mormon comes up. Seriously, without using Google, how many of you anti-Mormons know the difference between the Olmecs and the Mayas?

Well, me. I don't claim to be an expert on Pre-Colombian cultures, only on their writing systems, but …. oh, ho, looky what we have here.

"The Zapotecs [600 BC - 800 AD] were the first Mesoamerican people to use writing in the true sense of the term and to perfect the computation of time and calendrical cycles."

[and Screaming's footnote] Lehi landed in 600 BC

See? See? Joey Smith's ancestors loaded two of every clean wife and seven of the slutty kind on board their boats and sailed all the way around to the west coast of America bringing writing and numbers and calendars and Monte Alban. Maybe even coffee and chocolate.

After beaching their ships high up on the Mexican Plateau, they gave up their decimal numbers for a base twenty/sub-base five system, and gave up their 22-letter Alphabet in favor of hundreds of complicated pictorial heiroglyphs that stood for everything from individual words to syllables to sounds to meanings. Why wouldn't they? They even stopped writing right to left and started zigzagging down from the top left corner. It's more righteous, see.

You can hardly tell the difference, can you? 

On the other hand, we have good examples of Mesoamerican writing from before 600 B.C., so maybe the Mormons are full of shit.

**update: link is dead, he took his blog down. Guess I pissed him off.