Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

But there was a general refusal to believe that Native Americans could
have made the earthworks, despite several written firsthand descriptions of
Native peoples engineering and using them, as well as recorded accounts of
Native Americans themselves stating that their ancestors had constructed
them. Instead, Europeans fabricated elaborate mythologies to explain their
presence. Most of these stories featured some version of a “lost race,”
fables of an “advanced” people who were wiped out by contemporary
Native Americans. The bones and artifacts found within the mounds that
colonizers demolished for farming were, to them, clearly the remains of this
“lost race” (4).
Europeans were less unified on the exact identity of these mysterious
Mound Builders. Noting the resemblance of the great platform mound at
Cahokia to similar structures in Mexico, many believed that the Mound
Builders were Toltecs (who were, of course, themselves Indigenous).
Alternatively, because the geometric earthworks found in Ohio vaguely
resembled Early Neolithic barrows in Western Europe, they were connected
to ancient peoples from that region. Or perhaps the Mound Builders were
more recent: sailors led by the Welsh prince Madoc, or descendants of Irish
sailors led by the monk St. Brendan.
Still others argued that the mounds were built by Phoenicians or Chinese
sailors, by Romans or survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis. The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which was formed in the 19th
century, believed the ancestors of Native Americans to be descendants of
Lamanites, who, according to the Book of Mormon, had wiped out the godfearing
Nephites and were cursed with “a skin of blackness” as punishment.
In 1901, an elder of the German Baptist Brethren Church, Edmund Landon
West, suggested that Ohio—and more precisely, Serpent Mound—was
actually the location of Eden as described in the Bible (5).
Mound Builder theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries emphatically
agreed that the mounds were not built by the ancestors of the Native
Americans they had encountered. This convenient theory allowed for
settlers to believe that “Indians” were latecomers to the Americas and
therefore had no legitimate right to the lands that Europeans wanted for
themselves. Some pushed the idea further, with the circular logic of the
colonizer, by suggesting that the “lost race” had been European.
Regardless of who was here first, it was agreed that “Indians” certainly