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

Not much is known about the origins and finality of Christopher Columbus, who sailed across the ocean in 1492, landing in what became known as Hispaniola and leaving a trail of slavery and genocide in his wake. The explorer is widely believed to have been born in Genoa, Italy, but his genetic background is somewhat of a mystery: was he Italian, Basque, Catalan or Portuguese? He certainly wasn’t American, I can tell you that.

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

“Thanks to new technology, the previous partial theory that the remains in Seville are those of Christopher Columbus has been definitively 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 their findings on these claims, although they said they will reveal the explorer’s true origins in a TV special to be shown in Spain on Saturday, when the country commemorates Columbus’s arrival in America . If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s scientific research packaged into a dramatized TV special – it feels like they’re squeezing every bit of publicity out of their findings rather than focusing on publishing the research – but for each his own research.

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

But the plot thickens even further; in 1877, a lead box was found in the cathedral of Santo Domingo that read: “Illustrious and distinguished man, Christopher Columbus.” The box contained bone fragments. Now that coffin is buried at a monument in Santo Domingo Este, but it may also need to be tested; As Lorente noted to The Guardian, both known sets of bones are incomplete. In other words, they could both belong to the chieftain himself.

Columbus was an explorer who had a huge impact on the United States, despite never setting foot on the North American mainland. Although Columbus played a role in American mythology as the young country tried to distance itself from its British roots, he had nothing to do with the country that now reflects on his legacy.

The most important thing is that we can agree on certain facts. Regardless of what Christopher Columbus means to you – or not – he did not “discover” the New World. People were clearly here for millennia before him, and even jewelry from Europe made its way to North America before the European explorer did.