Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Christopher Columbus deliberately shielded his true lineage from the public while he was alive.
• To solve the longstanding mystery, a research team exhumed the bodies of 12 of his descendants to mine their DNA and trace family lines.
• The DNA exposed a direct link to noble houses in northern Spain, indicating that Columbus’ ancestry is Galician, not Italian.

Despite deep and highly contentious analysis of Christopher Columbus’ place as a significant figure in history—being both broadly credited with the discovery of the Americas and responsible for the brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples already settled there—experts have thus far been unable to accurately uncover all of the details of his past, including where exactly he was originally from. So, to find the answer, a group of researchers went the extra mile and exhumed the bodies of 12 descendants of Columbus from a Spanish crypt outside of Seville, mining their DNA to reveal facts about Columbus’ family history.

In a study uploaded to the pre-print server bioRxiv, the team claimed that in mapping the DNA of seven direct Columbus descendants, a surprising pattern of identical DNA was revealed in one of Columbus’ great-great-grandsons. The researchers wrote that the DNA presented a direct genetic link from Columbus’ descendants to the noble houses of Sotomayor in Galicia and Zúñiga in Navarre—both of which are in northern Spain, giving scientists the first hard DNA evidence supporting the idea that Columbus was of Galician descent.

The authors wrote that their findings provide a “robust genetic support for the hypothesis of a Galician provenance for Christopher Columbus, laying a definitive foundation within the scientific discourse for the reevaluation of his historical identity.”

Historically, experts have believed that Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, part of what is now Italy. Possibly the son of Dominico Colombo and Susanna Fontenarossa, he apprenticed in his father’s wool weaving business while studying sailing and mapmaking, and eventually began his sailing career on merchant ships as a teenager. Theories about his true identity have linked his heritage to Italy, Portugal, Spain, and even Scotland.

To hunt down the truth, they started at the Columbus family crypt, located at the Santa Maria de Gracia church in Gelves, Spain (outside of Seville). Historical documentation suggested that the family tomb of the Counts of Gelves—with burials from the 16th through 18th centuries—offered experts the best chance to understand the family’s DNA, since it contained the largest concentration of Columbus’ direct descendants.

The team exhumed 12 bodies from the crypt, matched age and sex profiles of those bodies to historical records, and used paleo-chemical analysis including radiocarbon and isotopic determinations, 3D scanning of samples, and Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for elemental composition analysis, followed by genetic studies using Massive Parallel Sequencing to reconstruct the kinship network within the crypt.

The major surprise came when two of the bodies proved to have an unexpected degree of genetic connection to Columbus—those of María de Castro Girón de Portugal, the sixth consort countess of Gelves, and Jorge Alberto de Portugal, the third Count of Gelves and great-great-grandson of Columbus. The two shared a total of 123.966 centimorgans of DNA, including a contiguous IBD segment of 50.605 centimorgans, reflecting a degree of relatedness researchers didn't expect, since no direct relationship between them had been historically documented. So they targeted their genetic data to hunt for even more evidence. The team used a “Virtual Knock-out” analysis to systematically test which ancestral figure explained the shared DNA between María de Castro and Jorge Alberto de Portugal, and eventually revealed that Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor was the crucial link: when he was computationally removed from the family tree, the kinship between the two individuals was completely eliminated.

This new data—along with the genetic analysis done on the rest of the remains in the crypt—gave the researchers a direct genetic line from a Columbus descendant to the noble houses of both Sotomayor in Galicia and Zúñiga in Navarre for the first time.

“The results confirm that the remains deposited in the church of Santa Maria de Gracia’s crypt are indeed those of the counts of Gelves, as historical accounts had suggested,” the authors wrote. “This study establishes a coherent framework linking the Columbus lineage to the elder Galician and Navarrese nobility.”

Whatever the reason was that Columbus had tried to shield his ancestry while he was alive, he would likely be disappointed to find out that a determined team of researchers has now solved the mystery.