On February 22, 1498, Christopher Columbus of the mid-1440s decreed in writing that his estate in the Italian port city of Genoa would be maintained for his family “because I came forth from it and was born therein.”

While most historians view the document as a ready-made account of the famous explorer’s birthplace, some have questioned its authenticity and wondered if there was more to it.

A decades-long investigation led by forensic scientist José Antonio Lorente of the University of Granada in Spain has now supported claims that Columbus may not have been of Italian descent after all, but was in fact born somewhere in Spain to parents of Jewish descent. .

The unveiling was announced as part of a special program broadcast in Spain to celebrate Columbus’s arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492.

It is important to keep in mind that science by the media should be viewed with caution, especially if there is no peer-reviewed publication that can be scrutinized.

“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really assess what was in the documentary, because they did not offer any data from the analysis,” Antonio Alonso, former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, told Manuel Ansede. and Nuño Domínguez at the Spanish news service El País.

“My conclusion is that the documentary never shows Columbus’ DNA and that we as scientists do not know what analysis was performed.”

Nevertheless, historical documents are increasingly challenged – and strengthened – by forensic analyzes of biological data, raising the possibility that Columbus’s own DNA could potentially reveal insights into his family history.

Based on interpretations of documents written as an adult, the man known to much of the Western world by the anglicized name Christopher Columbus was born Cristoforo Columbo sometime between late August and late October 1451 in Genoa, the bustling capital of the northwestern Italian region. region of Liguria.

Only later in his life, as a young man in his twenties, did he travel west to Lisbon, Portugal, in search of wealthy patrons who might finance his daring attempt to take a “shortcut” east by completely eliminating the to go the other way. .

Although most historians accept the court documents that consider his birthplace in Genoa as a reality, speculation about an alternative heritage has been going on for decades.

One persistent rumor claims that Columbus was secretly Jewish, born in Spain during a time of intense religious persecution and ethnic cleansing. Proponents of this claim cite curious discrepancies in his will and interpretations of the syntax in his letters.

Now it appears his own genes may provide a new line of evidence.

Lorente and his team of researchers claimed in the television special that their analysis of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from the remains of Columbus’ son Ferdinand and brother Diego is compatible with a Spanish or Sephardim Jewish heritage.

Of course, this does not categorically rule out Genoa, nor does it point to any particular place in Europe as the birthplace of the explorer. Jews exiled from Spain in the late 15th century, just as Columbus was making his historic voyage, poured into the Italian city to seek asylum, albeit with little success.

But any merit to Lorente’s findings would make Columbus’s Italian ancestry a little harder to support, raising questions about how someone of Sephardim Jewish descent could have been born in Genoa in the 1450s.

For the findings to be widely accepted, the results must be carefully examined, if not convincingly replicated in detail.

Even then, there is more to an individual’s story than just genetics – leaving open the question of how an individual from a persecuted minority truly came to represent the spearhead of Spanish expansion.

For now, the story of Columbus remains the story of an Italian sailor who caught the attention of the Spanish royal family, who was both celebrated and despised for the mark he inadvertently left on history, far from that “noble and mighty city by the sea.” his house Genoa.