It is possible that Christopher Columbus was a Spanish Jew and not a native of Genoa. These are the results of a 20-year genetic study of the legendary navigator’s remains, The Guardian reports.
The results of the study were announced Saturday night during a special program on national television network RTVE, dedicated to Spain Day, which commemorates Columbus’ arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492.
The forensic expert from the University of Granada who led the investigation José Antonio Lorente He stated that, based on the analysis results, Columbus’s DNA was “consistent” with Jewish ancestry.
“We have very partial but sufficient DNA from Christopher Columbus. We have your son’s DNA. Fernando Colonand on the Y chromosome [мужской] and mitochondrial DNA [переданной матерью] Fernando has traces consistent with Jewish origins,” Lorenzo said.
Lorente admitted that he could not pinpoint Columbus’s birthplace, but it is most likely that the navigator came from the Spanish Mediterranean.
“DNA indicates that Christopher Columbus came from the western Mediterranean. If in the 15th century there were no Jews in Genoa, the probability that he came from there is minimal. There was also no large Jewish presence in the rest of the Italian peninsula, which makes the situation very precarious,” says the researcher.
Since there were no solid theories or clear indications that Columbus could have been French, Lorente added, the search was narrowed even further.
“We are left with the Spanish Mediterranean, the Balearic Islands and Sicily. But Sicily would be strange, because then Christopher Columbus would have some trace of being Italian or Sicilian. All of this makes its most likely origin to be in the Spanish Mediterranean or in the Balearic Islands, which at the time belonged to the Crown of Aragon,” he points out.
According to RTVE, Lorente’s findings put an end to 500 years of speculation about Columbus’ birthplace and nationality. It has previously been suggested that the researcher could be Genoese, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or Scottish.
However, some of Lorente’s colleagues treated his conclusions with extreme caution, the British newspaper writes.
“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot accurately assess what was in the documentary because they did not provide any data from the analysis. “My conclusion is that the documentary does not show Columbus’s DNA and, as scientists, we do not know what tests were done.” — the geneticist and former director of the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Medicine of Spain told El País antonio alonso.
Expert in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Rodrigo BarqueraIn turn, he said that the results were presented without prior examination by other members of the scientific community and this surprised him.
“Normally you submit your article to a scientific journal. An editor is then assigned to the article and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it is scientifically sound or not. If so, then it is published and the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree or not. Showing this on the screen, far from this dialogue and with all this media attention, prevents the scientific community from saying anything about it,” he told El País.
Lorente, in an interview with the same newspaper, stated that “our team and the university have always seen this study of Christopher Columbus and his family as a single, unified and indivisible whole and nothing will be published until the investigation is completed.” .
