Columbus's DNA fails to solve his origin: 20 years for a fiasco

A documentary leaves Columbus's origin just as murky

The promise was to settle five centuries of speculation with a single laboratory data point. The result was the opposite. After the broadcast on La 1 — at 22:30, with Christopher Columbus's DNA as the star — the navigator's origin remains unclaimed and the Galician hypothesis, which many hoped to see confirmed, was left without support. The only thing taken for granted was what anyone who had looked twice at a 15th-century map already suspected: that the admiral was not Genoese.

What the documentary concluded about Columbus's DNA

Almost nothing, and that is the conclusion most repeated when turning off the television. The Italian route was ruled out on the grounds that Diego Columbus was not the admiral's blood brother, there was talk of partial concordance with Sephardic profiles from the western Mediterranean, and the figure of a converso who hid his origins was left floating. Not one of those pieces fixes a city, a region, or a kingdom. The announced final twist remained a wide shot.

The other block that the program accepted as valid is forensic: the remains attributed to Columbus and those of his son Hernando are validated, which in theory allows repeating comparisons with any future candidate. Some consider that point an fruta advance. Others respond that authenticating some bones does not bring us one kilometer closer to resolving where they came from, and that the documentary stopped halfway between the laboratory and the studio.

Where the Galician trail came from: Poio, Pedro Madruga and a house 50 meters away

The Galician hypothesis was not born in a studio. It was based on a handful of chained clues: a family, the Colóns, with documented presence in the area of Poio and Pontevedra; the figure of Pedro Madruga, a central figure for supporters of the Galician route; and a real estate fact that many find hard to ignore: the house identified as the navigator's residence is 50 meters from another that the Dukes of Veragua, descendants of Columbus, came to sell from Panama.

To this are added archival pieces that are repeated over and over: the real name of the Santa María would be la Gallega, Juan de la Cosa appears in the freight documents, and the mention that Columbus was Genoese in a document kept in a Danish museum would have been added in the 18th century. On paper it sounds like a closed case. In the laboratory, according to what was broadcast, it was not, and the Galician samples compared did not give the result the theory needed.

What Columbus knew about navigation and where he got it

One of the most solid threads of the analysis is not about surnames, it is about nautical charts. The Portuguese sailors who circumnavigated Africa knew that when rounding the Cape of Good Hope the prevailing winds pushed ships into the open sea. Columbus knew it too. That is why his first voyage went down to the Canary Islands: to reach the latitude of the trade winds and let himself be carried.

The admiral himself said that he traveled to Iceland and sailed below the equator trinc Portuguese routes, which allowed him to verify that the antiestéticars of the time — falling off the edge when crossing the line — were not realistic. With that background, plus what they might tell him in the north about lands to the west, he put two and two together. One of the interpretations that circulated in the thread suggests that much of the secret of his route was Portuguese technology, from a country that was not interested in publicizing it.

Can anything be concluded with degraded DNA from five centuries ago?

Very little. The investigation was presented as the fruit of about 20 years of work, with an initial group larger than some members who would have left because what they saw did not add up. The available genetic material was highly degraded, according to what was told, and comparisons were made against a limited number of samples, far from covering all living hypotheses. Valencia, Mallorca, and Catalonia were left out of the comparison.

Also missing is the step that any skeptic demands: publication in a scientific journal. The program hinted that the article would arrive in November, without a PDF, without peer review in sight, and without raw data on the table. Until that happens, what was broadcast is television, not science. And that difference, at this point, should not be forgotten.

The supposed Jewish gene that genetics cannot read

DNA does not identify religions: it identifies populations, mixtures, and kinship. Saying that someone presents traits compatible with populations from the eastern Mediterranean is not equivalent to saying that they practiced a specific cult, nor that they were born in a particular place. Compatible is not the same as proven, and that goes for a Sephardic Jew, for a Valencian, and for much of the peninsular coastline.

The controversy was inflated by a logical leap that the format did not bother to dismantle: if there is a Sephardic trait, then he was Jewish and that's that. Answered by the basics — a Sephardic trait does not imply practicing Judaism, and much of the population of the time shares that background — the argument unravels on its own. From there to conspiratorial noise about who pulls the strings of the world there is a step, and part of the exchange took it without genetics providing a single proof in that regard. Conviction is not a chromosome.

The origin matters less than who paid for the show

There was a current that settled the matter via the taxpayer: a public television broadcast, twenty years of work, and a result that closes no hypothesis. The complaint has merit: any attempt with historical or scientific substance ends up turned into a spectacle, with more focus on the morbid than on the data and with a taste of a seasonal product.

It is worth separating two things that the format deliberately mixes. That a documentary is poorly constructed does not invalidate the laboratory work that may be behind it. And vice versa: that the research is serious does not oblige anyone to swallow a montage that announces a plot twist and delivers a provisional report. The fruta wear is ultimately paid by science, not by the script.

That Columbus was Genoese is still taught in classrooms. That he was Galician is supported by a house and some files. That he was a Sephardic Jew from the western Mediterranean is, today, a statistical compatibility. How many more broadcasts will be needed for a file open for centuries to be resolved with a data point and not with a curtain?