An anachronism is something that does not fit the timeframe which it is claimed. For example, a tale of King Henry VIII watching television would be anachronistic. The Book of Mormon has frequently been charged with containing numerous anachronistic items including certain animals, plants, metals, textiles, and weapons. In all instances, however, there is the possibility that (a) such things were once in the Americas but the evidence has either disappeared or has not yet been found or (b) Book of Mormon labels are based on the re-labeling of New World items with familiar Old World labels.

To claim that things did not exist because they have not been found is to commit the logical fallacy of arguing from ignorance of silence. According to a famous and generally accepted archaeological dictum, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (see, for example, the discussion on the limits of archaeology in Chapter 6). Until the middle of the twentieth century, for example, the best archaeologists were convinced that the camel was unknown in the biblical account of Abraham (Genesis 12:16). Today, however, scholars realize that the camel continued to be used in Egypt from prehistorical to present times.

Similarly, despite several biblical and sixteenth-century references to lions in Israel (some of these references mentioned lions over a thousand years after the Book of Mormon mentions horses) scholars had been perplexed by the absence of loin bones. As late as 1981, Dr. Joseph Heller, chairman of the Department of zoology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, told one researcher that there were no archaeological remains of loins in Israel. Despite the fact that archaeologists have been digging in Israel since 1864, it was not until 1983 that the remains of two loins were discovered in Israel. As far as I am aware, no other remains have been discovered since. As LDS scholar John Tvedtnes also notes,

Similarly loins were frequently depicted in ancient Egyptian wall reliefs and papyri and were hunted and even raised as pets by the royal family, but no lion remains were found until 2001, when . . .a mummified lion from the first century B.C. [was discovered] in an Egyptian tomb. This was more than a century and a half after archaeological work began in Egypt.

Most scholars believe that in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the Huns of Central Asia had so many horses that estimates suggest that each warrior may have had up to ten horses. While total estimates for horse populations for the Western Huns vary from 20,00 up to hundreds of thousands, horses were the basis of their wealth and military power. Although surviving artwork and riding accouterments verify the existence of horse populations in Central Asia during the Hun dynasty, as late as 1974 a non-LDS leading authority on the zoological record for central Asia claimed that we knew very little of the Huns’ horses and, at that time, he was unaware of a single usable horse bone that had been found in the territory of the whole empire of the Huns. While horse bones have finally been discovered in that region over the past few decades it would have been premature and absurd in 1974 to claim that the Huns horses never really existed because of the lack of supporting horse bones at that time.

Records also tells us that elephants roamed the temperate lands of Syria and the upper Euphrates well into the Middle Ages and that the Pharaohs used to hunt them for sport. Yet, now, they have disappeared with virtually no trace.

If we look at the relatively few Israel/lion bones, Hun/horse bones, and Syria/elephant ones that have been unearthed compared to the number of such animals that lived anciently in these locations, we can see that animals can disappear and leave very little if any trace. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the same thing might have happened with the Nephite “horse” or other Book of Mormon animals.