#WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SPANISH SKIN#

The new team has now collected DNA samples from more than 350 men in Catalonia whose last name is Colom - the Catalan way of saying Columbus - and from 80 in Italy whose last name is Colombo.

One piece of evidence supporting this latter idea is that when Columbus wrote back from the New World in Spanish - not Italian - he used words and phrases that reflected influence from the Catalan language, Castro said. Traditional theory says he was from Genoa, Italy, but another line of argument says Columbus was actually from the Catalonia region of northeast Spain. He had asked to be buried in the Americas, but no church of sufficient stature existed there.Ĭastro says the team is now focusing their DNA tools on another Columbus mystery: his country of origin. “We Christians believe that one does not bother the dead,” he said.Ĭolumbus died and was buried in Valladolid on May 20, 1506. However, Bautista said he would not allow the remains to be tested. 'Now, studying the remains in the Dominican Republic is more necessary and exciting than ever,' he said. 'We don't know what is in there,' Castro said.Ĭastro said that in light of the DNA evidence from Spain, the objective of opening the Santo Domingo tomb would be to determine who, if not Columbus, is buried there. Columbus' body was moved several times after his death, and the tomb in Santo Domingo might conceivably also hold part of the right body. The goal of opening the lighthouse tomb was to compare those remains to the ones from Diego in Seville and determine which country had buried the man who arrived in the New World in 1492, landing at the island of Hispaniola, which today comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti.Ĭastro stressed in an interview that, although his team is convinced the bones in Seville are from Columbus, this does not necessarily mean the ones in Santo Domingo are not.

#WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SPANISH SKIN#

One can reject races as biological categories with clear boundaries without denying that a DNA test can give a pretty good idea what a person looks like in terms of skin color, hair, and general geographic region of their primary ancestry.'The remains have never left Dominican territory,' Bautista said. That’s a long discussion, but the piece’s only weakness is in its discussion of that. The Tracker could say it’s a race test, but doesn’t like the term much at all. In her lead example, the cops learned long after the crime that they shouldn’t be looking for a white guy. Last week Wired‘s Melba Newsome had a solid, long account of forensic DNA tests that reveal from genetic markers of a (yet unknown) suspect enough about his or her ancestry to narrow the search to certain regional types.

LATE ADDITION: Yet another is brought to The Tracker’s attention, thank you very much. This is especially true of owners who know the mother was some fancy-pants AKC-certified breed, but what was pops and how’d he get inside the gate? One company, Jenkins reports, can distinguish the genetic markers of 134 of the 157 breeds the American Kennel Club lists. Many owners of mongrels want to know their pooches’ parentage percentages. On the AP, Nate Jenkins turns us from people to their pets. This looks reminiscent of those geneaology companies that almost always say their customers come from royalty, or George Washington, or Genghis Khan. Plus, the show’s producers sneakily sent DNA samples to competing companies which, in many cases, each solemnly pronounced a different key lineage. They may be well-meaning, Stahl reported, but they tend to mumble when revealing just how incomplete and ambiguous the results can be when they rely on only Y-chromosomes for paternal ancestry, and mitochondrial DNA for maternal. On Sunday’s CBS 60 minutes, Lesley Stahl reported the high hopes that many people pin on commercial DNA tests to reveal their genetic (and by inference, cultural) heritages - with a strong dose of debunking of the services. Only synchronicity can explain those below: 12 (or today if one believes in shifting such things to make long weekends) New World discovery 501st anniversary is reason enough for the story above. Muddying that water is that, it turns out, Y chromosomes of today’s men named Colom in Catalonia, and of men named Columbo in Genoa, are so similar it’ll take a super-duper DNA analysis to tell the difference – and that takes time. A scrap of DNA from a bone purported to be CC’s makes it plausible. The science angle is that DNA tests on Y chromosomes are being run to try to settle it. Several other ideas out there too - at least the Russians don’t claim him. Now on the NYTimes‘s front page Amy Harmon has a story with a fascinating table about partisan arguments that nope he was from Catalonia in Spain, or Portugal (from royalty no less), or Majorca, or that he was from Spain and converted from Judaism to evade the Inquisition. In school we all learned Christopher Columbus was from Genoa.

Was christopher columbus spanish