Just in time for the long weekend.
Genetic testing has finally confirmed the official resting place of Christopher Columbus, and scientists who announced the discovery say they also now know his ethnic origin — although they aren’t revealing it yet.
The partial set of human remains housed in an elaborate catafalque at the Seville Cathedral in Spain are indeed those of the controversial explorer, forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente said Thursday.
Lorente and other members of a team of scientists at the University of Granada identified the remains using samples taken from Columbus’s son, Fernando, and one of his brothers.
“Today, thanks to new technology, the previous partial theory that the remains in Seville are those of Christopher Columbus has been definitively confirmed,” Lorente said at a press conference.
Columbus died in what is now Spain in 1506, but he supposedly wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is made up of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
His remains were said to have been taken there in 1542. All or at least some of them are then believed to have been moved to Cuba in 1795 and then to Seville in 1898, when Spain lost control of Cuba in the Spanish-American War.
Over the past century, experts have debated whether Columbus’ full remains were taken to Seville for his official final resting place or if some or all of them were still unofficially in the DR.
In 1877, an excavation of the Santo Domingo Cathedral in the Dominican Republic had turned up a small lead box of incomplete bone fragments labeled as Columbus’.
Those remains – which are now interred at the so-called Columbus Lighthouse in Santo Domingo Este — also might belong to the explorer, as the set of remains in Seville is incomplete, too, Lorente said.
It wasn’t clear if testing would be done on the remains in the DR.
As for Columbus’ genetic background, the scientist played coy when pressed about what the DNA tests revealed.
Columbus famously sailed for Spain in 1492, but historians have debated whether the original story that he hailed from Genoa, Italy, was actually true.
Over the years, experts have suggested Columbus was actually a Spain Jew or possibly Greek, Basque or Portuguese.
Those findings will be shared in a documentary, “Columbus DNA: The True Origin,” which will air on the Spanish national broadcaster TVE on Saturday.
Lorente called the investigation “very complicated” as he teased the final reveal.
“There are some really important results – results that will help us in multiple studies and analyses that should be evaluated by historians,” he said, according to the Guardian.
Columbus is celebrated with a federal holiday in the US on the second Monday of October every year, although not without controversy.
For centuries, he had been credited with “discovering America,” but that description has since been largely debunked by historians who say he made it to the Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean but not what is now known as the US. Critics also say he forced indigenous people to work as slaves and that his travels introduced ravaging diseases to their populations.
Still, some Italian-Americans say his risky explorations opened the door for the settling of the Americas by Europe and should be celebrated as such.
In an attempt to balance both sides, the US now celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day on the same day as Columbus Day.
With Post wires
