Researchers claim bones in Spanish church belonged to Christopher Columbus

A team of researchers who spent years studying remains to determine the final resting place of Christopher Columbus says the explorer’s remains are in a cathedral in Seville, Spain.

Not much is known about the origins and goals of Christopher Columbus. He sailed across the blue ocean in 1492, landing in the area that later became known as Hispaniola and leaving behind a trail of slavery and genocide. It is widely believed that the explorer was born in Genoa, Italy, but his genetic background is a mystery – was he Italian, Basque, Catalan or Portuguese? He definitely wasn’t American, I can tell you that.

Now a team of scientists in Spain say the incomplete remains in Seville Cathedral are those of the 15th-century explorer. The team tested DNA samples from the remains in the tomb, as well as DNA from Columbus’ brother Diego and his son Fernando.

“Today, thanks to new technology, the previous partial theory that the remains in Seville are those of Christopher Columbus has been finally confirmed,” José Antonio Lorente, a forensic researcher at the University of Grenada, told The Guardian.

The team did not immediately publish a scientific paper on its findings to accompany those claims, but said it would reveal the explorer’s true origins in a television special to be shown in Spain on Saturday, as the country commemorates the arrival of Columbus remembered on the American continent. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s scientific research being packaged into a dramatized TV special – it feels like they’re squeezing every bit of publicity out of their findings rather than focusing on them to focus on publishing research – but to each their own.

According to Atlas Obscura, even in death, Columbus had a detour. The explorer died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506 and was then moved to Seville on the orders of his brother Diego. But in 1542 – 50 years after his career-defining voyage – Columbus was towed to the Cathedral of Santa Maria in Santo Domingo. Columbus’ remains rested there until 1795, when Spain lost the Dominican Republic and Columbus was taken to Cuba, where he remained for a century. Only then – a little over a century ago – were Columbus’ remains returned to Seville. This shell game involving human remains didn’t make it any easier to find the explorer’s final resting place.

But the plot thickens even more; In 1877, a lead box marked “Famous and Distinguished Man, Christopher Columbus” was found in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. There were bone fragments in the box. Now this box is buried at a monument in Santo Domingo Este, but may also need to be tested; As Lorente pointed out to The Guardian, both known sets of bones are incomplete. In other words, they could both belong to the captain himself.

Columbus was an explorer who had a major impact on the United States, even though he never set foot on the North American mainland. Although Columbus played a role in American myth-making as the young country sought to distance itself from its British roots, he had nothing to do with the country now reflecting on its legacy.

The most important thing is that we can agree on certain facts. No matter what Christopher Columbus means to you – or not – he did not “discover” the New World. Apparently people had been here for thousands of years before him, and even jewelry from Europe made it to North America before the European explorer.