On February 22, 1498, a good-natured man in his mid-40s wrote to Christopher Columbus that his estate in the Italian port city of Genoa should be preserved for his family, "because I came from there and was born there."
Although most historians consider the document a clear record of the famous explorer's birthplace, some have questioned its authenticity and wondered if there is more to the story.
A decades-long investigation led by forensic scientist José Antonio Lorente of the University of Granada in Spain has now revealed that Columbus may not have been of Italian descent after all, but was born to Jewish parents somewhere in Spain.
The revelation was announced during a special broadcast in Spain on October 12, 1492, to celebrate Columbus' arrival in the New World.
It is important to remember that science in the media should be treated with caution, especially when there is no peer-reviewed publication to critically examine.
"Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really judge what was shown in the documentary because they did not provide any data from the analysis," the former director of the Spanish National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, Antonio Alonso, told Manuel Ansede and Nuño DomÃnguez of the Spanish news service El PaÃs.
DNA reveals surprising twist about Christopher Columbus
On February 22, 1498, a good-natured man in his mid-40s wrote to Christopher Columbus that his estate in the Italian port city of Genoa should be preserved for his family, "because I came from there and was born there."
Although most historians consider the document a clear record of the famous explorer's birthplace, some have questioned its authenticity and wondered if there is more to the story.
A decades-long investigation led by forensic scientist José Antonio Lorente of the University of Granada in Spain revealed that Columbus may not have been of Italian descent after all, but was born to Jewish parents somewhere in Spain.
The revelation was announced during a special broadcast in Spain on October 12, 1492, to celebrate Columbus' arrival in the New World.
It is important to remember that science in the media should be treated with caution, especially when there is no peer-reviewed publication to critically examine.
"Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we cannot really judge what was shown in the documentary because they did not provide any data from the analysis," the former director of the Spanish National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, Antonio Alonso, told Manuel Ansede and Nuño DomÃnguez of the Spanish news service El PaÃs.
Now it seems his own genes may provide new evidence.
Lorente and his team of researchers claimed on the TV show that their analysis of Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA from the remains of Columbus' son Ferdinand and brother Diego suggest Spanish or Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
That doesn't categorically rule out Genoa, of course, nor does it pinpoint a specific place in Europe as the explorer's birthplace. In fact, Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century, when Columbus began his groundbreaking voyage, flocked to the Italian city seeking asylum, although few succeeded.
If Lorente's findings are correct, however, it would complicate Columbus' Italian ancestry and raise questions about how someone of Sephardic Jewish heritage could have been born in Genoa in the 1450s.
For the findings to be widely accepted, they will need to be carefully tested, if not convincingly replicated in detail.
Even then, there is more to a person's story than genetics - and it remains an open question how a member of a persecuted minority could really become the spearhead of Spanish expansion.
For now, the story of Columbus remains that of an Italian navigator who caught the attention of the Spanish royal family and who was both celebrated and despised for the mark he inadvertently left on history - far from the "noble and powerful city by the sea" of his native Genoa.
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