Posted on Sat, Oct. 02, 2004
Mystery: Who's buried in Columbus' tomb?
Spanish researchers have DNA evidence suggesting Christopher Columbus was buried in Spain, not the Dominican Republic. But they have drawn no firm conclusion.
BY DANIEL WOOLLS
Associated Press
MADRID - Two nations that boast ornate graves purporting to be the resting place of Christopher Columbus will have to wait a while longer to learn which has legitimate bragging rights.
Researchers studying DNA from 500-year-old bone slivers found near Seville, Spain, said Friday that preliminary data suggest Columbus might be buried in Spain, rather than in a rival tomb in the Dominican Republic.
But they aren't certain, and say more research is needed. It's not the definitive answer either side wanted.
After his death and first burial in 1506 in Valladolid, Spain, Columbus' bones embarked on a lengthy odyssey befitting a man considered one of the world's great explorers.
In 1509, his remains were moved to a monastery on La Cartuja, next to Seville.
In 1537, María de Rojas y Toledo, widow of one of Columbus' sons, Diego, sent the bones of her husband and his father to a cathedral in Santo Domingo for burial. There they lay until 1795, when Spain ceded Hispaniola to France and decided the explorer's remains should not fall into the hands of foreigners.
AN AGE-OLD DISPUTE
A set of remains that the Spaniards believed were Christopher Columbus' were shipped to Havana, and then back to Seville when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898.
In 1877, workers digging in the Santo Domingo cathedral unearthed a leaden box containing bones and bearing the inscription, ``Illustrious and distinguished male, don Cristóbal Colón.''
The Dominican Republic claims these are genuine remains -- and that the Spaniards took the wrong body back in 1795.
Enter the scientists: To settle the dispute, they dug up and extracted DNA material from three sets of bones in Seville:
• The set Spain claims came from Columbus
• One historians are certain belong to one of his sons, Hernando
• And one researchers believe is his brother, Diego.
They compared the remains supposedly from the explorer with those believed to be those of Diego, the brother. Both were unearthed in Seville over the past two years.
But DNA degrades over time, and much of the genetic material the Spanish team analyzed is in awful shape.
''It is degraded, it is contaminated and we don't have much of it,'' forensic geneticist Jose Antonio Lorente said.
Eighty percent of the samples taken are indecipherable so far, but 20 percent match, suggesting Spain might have the right corpse.
New genetic techniques are needed to salvage the other 80 percent.
The scientists' trump card was Hernando, born of an extramarital affair. Historians say they are sure the bones in Seville are his because his remains were never moved after his 1539 burial.
ELUSIVE EVIDENCE
The research team -- consisting of Lorente, who is director of the genetics lab at the University of Granada; two high school teachers who do historical research, and a forensic anthropologist -- found Hernando's DNA in good shape.
Still, there was a problem: Siblings share DNA from one part of the human cell; fathers and sons from another. But this kind is scarce and hard to extract.
So far, the purported Christopher Columbus remains have yielded none of the kind of DNA needed to check against Hernando's, Lorente said.
To settle things once and for all, genetic material from the body buried in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, is also needed. There, a sprawling, cross-shaped lighthouse called the Faro a Colón is also said to hold the remains of the man known in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón.
Officials in the Dominican Republic said the government would not decide whether to open the urn containing the bones until it receives Spain's report next week.
The Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Cardinal Nicolas de Jesús López, holds the sole key to the urn and likely would influence any decision, officials said.
