DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville

54 pointsposted 9 months ago
by rmason
(theguardian.com)

84 Comments

alephxyz

9 months ago

>The conclusion followed comparisons of DNA samples from the tomb with others taken from one of Columbus’s brothers, Diego, and his son Fernando.

>The knottier question of the explorer’s precise origins will be revealed in Columbus DNA: His True Origin, a special TV programme shown on Saturday 12 October, the date when Spain celebrates its national day and commemorates Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

So if we've had DNA samples of his brother what was stopping us from finding out his "precise origins" earlier?

pvaldes

9 months ago

Some brothers can have different mothers or fathers.

As the origins of Colon were unknown his real family relationships were also unknown. He toke a lot of measures to hide their identity including lying about it. The scientists did DNA tests to Italians with surname Colomb and discovered an unexpected amount of variability (Those people weren't related).

It seems that Colomb (Pigeon?) was a surname applied on Italy for children without parents, so was shared by different people without a real genetic relationship. John "Snow" style. This means also that it was also the perfect surname that somebody wanting to hide their past would chose. This way he could just pretend that didn't knew about his family when interrogated by Kings and powerful people. Refusing to answer otherwise would be extremely dangerous.

litoE

9 months ago

I'm confused. They have just now determined that they do indeed have Columbus's DNA so they can finally answer the question of where he was from. But all along they have had the DNA of his brother and of his son. Wouldn't their DNA have answered that question just as well?

bbor

9 months ago

Because this article is nationalist lies released on a dramatic TV show for Spain's "national day", not real science. Sorry! For some reason, people are still fighting to claim more credit for the guy who was condemned at the time for immoral behavior. Nationalists gonna nationalist, I guess.

Specifically, they probably don't have Columbus' DNA, and if they do, it's from a very small collection of highly degraded hand bones: https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/7HHNA2XRENAIDKTSS4RUG...

The bones that are supposedly from his brother are in similar condition, and also this guy "now claims that the alleged remains of Christopher and Diego do not correspond to those of two brothers, but to two second cousins." See my comment history or https://elpais.com/ciencia/2024-10-12/el-show-del-adn-de-cri... for more info.

ls612

9 months ago

Surprising (but heartening) that in all that time the true remains weren't stolen and replaced with someone else's.

Qem

9 months ago

Around 20 generations passed since Columbus set foot in Americas. Given we have his DNA, I wonder if it's still possible to pinpoint living descendants if any exists.

AlotOfReading

9 months ago

Genetic contributions from any individual ancestor outside the direct maternal line quickly becomes almost indistinguishable once you get more than a few generations out. Centuries out like Columbus is, it's entirely possible for him to have contributed 0 base pairs to any of his descendants.

Some of Columbus' descendants still hold noble titles though, like the Duke of Veragua:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crist%C3%B3bal_Col%C3%B3n_de...

columbus567

9 months ago

I don't think it is possible - the autosomes recombine quite quickly, after 20 generations I think all the IBDs would be wiped away. But I might be wrong.

pvaldes

9 months ago

He had no past, but after discovering America, his family bloodlines were annotated in historical reports.

huhtenberg

9 months ago

Here's a better and cleaner source of the same news -

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/11/dna-study-chri....

the-express.com page has 2 scroll-fulls of 3rd party garbage blocked by uBlock.

mikestew

9 months ago

Boy howdy, you’re not kidding. Most of the page is huge swathes of white where the Pi-hole said, “nuh, uh”.

muststopmyths

9 months ago

Also “confirmed” in original vs “found” in the express link

Waterluvian

9 months ago

This is weird. This is twice now that a Guardian article will simply not scroll on my iPhone. I just cannot view the article. The page is just broken.

timeon

9 months ago

I have this with whole Guardian site on macos Safari but works in ff.

Vivtek

9 months ago

"Today, traveling to the same Caribbean islands can be tricky, as anyone caught with contraband can face serious repercussions."

That is a very odd take on the Caribbean, and it's the third paragraph in the article. I've seen text spinners, but this feels AI-driven. Surely a human couldn't be this inane.

MichaelZuo

9 months ago

LLMs have gotten good enough that it’s practically impossible to tell apart the difference in output between a real human mid-wit writer and LLM output, especially if it has gone through some editing.

So it’s probably best to err on the side of caution.

sml156

9 months ago

Its a link to other articles on the same site, nothing nefarious

kelnos

9 months ago

It just felt gratuitously weird. It was completely out of place given the purpose of the article. Either it served to support some beef the author has with that region, or just to find any excuse to link to another article on the site.

pryelluw

9 months ago

Yeah, traveling anywhere with contraband is dangerous. Why single out the Caribbean?

ywvcbk

9 months ago

Seems like a nonsensical click-bait title.

They found his remains by confirming that they are indeed buried in the tomb with his name on it?

CSMastermind

9 months ago

If you read the Gaurdian article that someone linked the confirmation was needed because his remains were transported under some secrecy multiple times.

Originally he was buried in Hispaniola where today is the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

Motivated by fear of their destruction, they were moved to Cuba in 1795 under secrecy when France took over the island following several revolts.

When Spain lost the Spanish-American war and ceded Cuba in 1898 they were then transported to Seville.

Various conspiracy theories arose that the remains were never truly moved out of Santo Domingo, fueled by the fact that the remains in Seville were only partial and hand bones were found in a box in Santo Domingo with an inscription claiming they belonged to Columbus.

The researchers note that the hand bones could also be authentic with his remains split between Spain and the Dominican Republic.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

ywvcbk

9 months ago

Yes, I knew all that. "Found" is still the the wrong word to use.

brindidrip

9 months ago

The article spun off into an op-ed piece discrediting Columbus and his achievements. What a shame.

DonHopkins

9 months ago

It's a shame what he did. Why do you seem to think it's such a shame that somebody wrote about those historical facts? You don't like history? What's a shame is that you want to rewrite it.

belval

9 months ago

I read the journals of Colombus mostly as a result of reading comments like yours and wondering what I was missing that wasn't taught in school so to speak.

At least in the Kantian sense, the guy was not really bad in that he didn't really intend to do much harm. His writing is very tied to bringing Christianity to Caribbean tribes, some of which were still actively practising cannibalism. He "scammed" them by trading glass beads for gold, but that still feels somewhat minor. I wonder if people don't sometime confuse him with Cortés (who was a true piece of work) and the later stage of Spanish colonisation which all happens several years after the death of Columbus.

dragonwriter

9 months ago

> I read the journals of Colombus

Perhaps not the most neutral source.

> At least in the Kantian sense, the guy was not really bad in that he didn't really intend to do much harm.

No, they just recognize him as someone whose torture and other cruelty and abuses as a colonial administrator were so severe and notorious that he got thrown in chains, dragged back to Spain, and stripped of titles for them, in late 15th century Spain, not exactly a model of moderation when it came to conversion of subject populations to Christianity or paragon of human rights more generally.

belval

9 months ago

> Perhaps not the most neutral source.

Considering most of the things raised against him in the 21st century were not really frowned up in the 15-16th, I don't think this is a major issue. Additionally, the version I read was https://www.amazon.com/Four-Voyages-Dispatches-Connecting-Na... which has some contextualization by the editor.

> whose torture and other cruelty and abuses as a colonial administrator were so severe and notorious that he got thrown in chains, dragged back to Spain

I did not say he was an inspiring role model and that was abuse directed towards Spanish settlers which is definitely not what people refer to when they call Colombus a monster...

tirant

9 months ago

Trading glass beads for gold can only be a scam if seen by a simplistic perspective.

Gold was abundant in America and not worth much for those tribes, but glass beads or mirrors were products of a technology not available to those natives, so for them the exchange was extremely valuable, as they were obtaining something unique and unavailable to hem in exchange of some shiny stones found everywhere.

belval

9 months ago

For the Carribbean tribes he made first contact with gold was somewhat of a big deal though as they could only get it by trade with other continental tribes. The first few people that he encountered weren't doing any kind of gold mining.

AlotOfReading

9 months ago

The dude took slaves, instituted a brutal gold quota, hung the corpses of resistors to rot, and other cartoonishly evil things. He was such a piece of work even by Spanish colonial standards that he was hauled back to Spain and stripped of his governorship.

He was very, very far from a nice person.

tirant

9 months ago

Even by Spanish colonial standards? Those colonial standards were not at all low, they were more advanced than any of their equivalent European counterparts. Any native people were considered children of god, due to their Catholic view, and us such viewed as free people. And those were the first laws proposed already in 1513 in Burgos. More advanced laws came some decades later by Bartolomé de las Casas.

In reality the settlers were not supervised and the laws were not always followed, but they were expected by the Government back in European Spain.

AlotOfReading

9 months ago

That's whitewashing the realities, but in any case the comparison was with modern sensibilities rather than early modern Europeans'.

huuhee3

9 months ago

There is some dispute on whether all those accusations were true, or politically motivated slander. Sure he did evil things by our standards, but there's no certainty whether he was that much worse than other rulers of that time. Taking slaves and hanging people alone isn't that special for the era.

AlotOfReading

9 months ago

The things I've listed are the uncontroversial ones. He presented said slaves to the king and Queen. His own son wrote a biography lionizing his father and talking about the gold quota. We have the court records of his governorship being stripped for brutality.

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

[flagged]

huuhee3

9 months ago

To be honest he wasn't that murderous and inhumane by the standards of that time. Back then Europe was ruled by royals who were happy to kill countless of lives in useless wars. Columbus was no better or worse than average ruler/warlord or whatever of the era.

The act of sailing over the Atlantic and discovering the new world was pretty cool, what happened after that not. There is no need to make a hero or villain out of him.

lazyeye

9 months ago

I think pretty much everyone in all of human history would have failed the test of contemporary moral standards on some level.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

david38

9 months ago

[flagged]

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

“Deliberate misinterpretation”-? “Colored by his treatment”-? such an interesting choice of words. You’re very good at this euphemism dance.

Bravo.

So if I “discover” a house down the street I’ve never seen before, I “achieved” the title of “discoverer” as well! Ok so I guess he did “accomplish” something, I stand corrected.:

He “discovered” the place that was not called Hispaniola by any of the people that called it home.

He “discovered” the gold that those people were literally wearing at their home. I guess that means he can keep that too?

He “discovered” that he could force those at gun point to bring him all the gold they could find from their home.

He “discovered” that he could coerce the people into doing that by beheading the leaders of their home.

He “discovered” he and his crew could rape the women they found in their home.

Such an interesting choice of words you were taught to describe home invasion, rape, murder, robbery.

Wytwwww

9 months ago

> So if I “discover” a house down the street I’ve never seen before, I “achieved” the title of “discoverer” as well!

No, but if you find a house nobody else in the city, country and even the content you live in have ever seen or aware of then yes you can yourself a “discoverer”.

e.g. if humans somehow found sentient aliens somewhere in the galaxy you wouldn't consider that a discovery either? Whether or not they later enslave or murder them doesn't really change that...

yieldcrv

9 months ago

they really sat on this until his special US holiday weekend

funny

kykeonaut

9 months ago

more than likely for the National Day of Spain which also falls on Oct 12th :)

yieldcrv

9 months ago

glad to read he is celebrated somewhere more relevant to his travels

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

[flagged]

khaki54

9 months ago

Gross. What's wrong with you?

krapp

9 months ago

[flagged]

ywvcbk

9 months ago

> was one of the most evil men

> If anyone's corpse deserves a pissing on, it would be his.

That's a strong statement. I mean he was obviously very cruel and greedy but I don't see how he was particularly exceptional in that way compared to thousands of other historical figures (we can call all of them one of the most evil men in history but that just makes the term meaningless..).

Even in the same ~50 year timeframe his direct "achievements" pale to compared to those of Cortés, Pizzaro.

kelnos

9 months ago

Honestly, I think there's a lot of space in the "most evil men in history" bucket. Columbus can sit in it, right there along with Cortés, Pizarro, and those other thousands.

Dalewyn

9 months ago

[flagged]

krapp

9 months ago

I'm judging Columbus by the standards of his own day. Spain ordered Columbus not to take slaves from the Caribbean - they wanted to colonize the land and convert the locals, but Columbus enslaved the population anyway, and shipped them to Spain by the boatload. And his governorship of the place was so brutal and cruel he was arrested and taken away in chains. Contemporary accounts by missionaries judge him the same way.

davoneus

9 months ago

I wouldn't believe any missionaries statements of fact. After all, their history is as bad or worse than Columbus wrt the treatment of the native peoples in the Americas.

Wytwwww

9 months ago

> their history is as bad or worse than Columbus

Really? That seems like an absurd statement.

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

Much thuggery. Much shifty. Much euphemism. Much denialism.

ywvcbk

9 months ago

> deranged?

Can you elaborate what do you mean by that?

Dalewyn

9 months ago

We are going out of our way to repaint history in the worst way possible using standards that should not be applied. No wonder people are so miserable and divided these days when we are led to be miserable in everything.

ywvcbk

9 months ago

> using standards that should not be applied

There were plenty of people willing to apply those standards back in those days, even if they rarely had significant political influence outside of a handful of cases. e.g. Las Casas (almost a contemporary of Columbus) even managed to convince the Spanish state to pass legislation in 1542 that might be even considered progressive by the standards of the of the 1700s or even 1800s (of course it wasn’t necessarily very effective).

Why do you want to erase them from history?

> we are led to be miserable in everything.

Are we? How does saying that Columbus was greedy and cruel (even by contemporary standards) somehow makes us miserable? Seems entirely tangential..

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

To the sane people, he means:

“repaint history” = correct historical inaccuracies in textbooks

“In the worst way possible” = as correctly as possible

“Using standards that should not be applied” = using the proper standards and I don’t like that for “reasons”

“No wonder people are so miserable and divided these days” = No wonder people don’t like people that spread the same misinformation as me at the moment

“When we are led to be miserable in everything” - “when led to learn from our prior mistakes and try to improve the future of ALL peoples”

kelnos

9 months ago

[flagged]

Dalewyn

9 months ago

[flagged]

dang

9 months ago

Please stop posting flamewar comments and/or using HN for ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dalewyn

9 months ago

A flame war involves flaming someone which I wasn't doing, but you do you.

dang

9 months ago

That's not the sense in which we use the term for HN moderation. If you prefer different terms, we could put it this way: please avoid ideological battle and denunciatory rhetoric.

Dalewyn

9 months ago

Unless you can point to where I was attacking ("denouncing", "flaming") someone, you're shouting hot air.

I agree it's an ideological conversation, though.

EDIT: There is a literal ideological battle over here[1] right now, if you want to weigh in on that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830717

acdha

9 months ago

> I also think that it is ridiculous we apply the standards of today, deranged or otherwise, upon figures and events in history.

Okay, how about the standards of his time, where he was so brutal a governor that the Spanish monarchs launched and investigation which eventually saw him lose his position as governor and be imprisoned?

https://jeffjacoby.com/27260/i-used-to-defend-columbus-as-ma...

Bartolomé de las Casas spent his career denouncing those evils, eventually getting another Spanish king to pass laws specifically banning the kind of things Colombus did. Even by the standards of his time, it was shocking.

archagon

9 months ago

What is tragic is how Columbus’s atrocities are routinely swept under the rug for the sake of nationalistic hero worship. Forget historic contextualization: we never even covered the sickening extent of what he did to the natives in our high school curriculum. Any student of history should be infuriated by this.

(Also, if I recall correctly, his actions were considered brutal even in his own time.)

khaki54

9 months ago

[flagged]

prisenco

9 months ago

| Actual historical accounts tell something much closer to the the original story we knew as children

Anyone who thinks this is remotely true should read A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas.

MisterBastahrd

9 months ago

Makes perfect sense to go to the people who practically worship the guy when you want to know factual details about his history.

krapp

9 months ago

> Saying a bunch of deranged stuff with progressive buzzwords sprinkled in doesn't make it appropriate or correct.

I mean, accusing me of being Nazi adjacent because I'm opposed to slavery seems deranged, but you do you.

atlas_hugged

9 months ago

[flagged]

dang

9 months ago

Since you've continued to break the site guidelines egregiously and ignored our requests to stop, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(No, this has nothing to do with your views on Christopher Columbus or any other topic.)