Scientists have ‘definitively’ proved identity of remains – with navigator’s precise origins to be revealed

Scientists have ‘definitively’ proved identity of remains – with navigator’s precise origins to be revealed

Scientists in Spain claim to have solved the two lingering mysteries that cling to Christopher Columbus more than five centuries after the explorer died: are the much-travelled remains buried in a magnificent tomb in Seville Cathedral really his? And was the navigator who changed the course of world history really from Genoa – as history has long claimed – or was he actually Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Jewish or Portuguese?

The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is … wait until Saturday.

The long-running and often competitive theorising has not been helped by his corpse’s posthumous voyages. Although Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506, he wanted to be buried on the island of Hispaniola, which is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were taken there in 1542, moved to Cuba in 1795, and then brought to Seville in 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba after the Spanish-American war.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    233·
    1 month ago

    i can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some more useful science that these scientists could be doing (i write, while reading garbage on the internet)

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      202·
      1 month ago

      I don’t know, I think they did a great service to every indigenous person in both Americas by revealing the source of all of their centuries of pain and suffering.

      • zcd@lemmy.caEnglish
        101·
        1 month ago

        Now they know where to install the urinal

      • Nastybutler@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, because if Columbus hadn’t discovered the Americas, no one would have, and the Natives would still be living free and unmolested to this day. Solid point.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          42·
          1 month ago

          Sure. And if Hitler didn’t exist, someone else would finish the job of killing off the Jews of Europe that had been going on for centuries. So Adolf Hitler absolved, am I right?

          • Nastybutler@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 month ago

            Straight to Godwin, huh? Not to mention it’s hardly a good comparison. Spain and Europe’s empire expansion philosophy as a whole would have led to the same result once the New World was discovered. If you disagree with that, then I don’t know how to talk to you about this topic. It’s obviously a totally different case than what Hitler did.

            Edit: Just to clarify, I’m not saying Columbus wasn’t a terrible human being, just that even if he was a saint, the outcome for indigenous peoples on this continent would have been the same. If you want to focus your hatred on one man as the source of all the suffering and genocide here, I’d probably go with Cortez over Columbus, but it would still be misplaced hatred

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
              41·
              1 month ago

              Cool. Another person who doesn’t understand what Godwin’s law was:

              “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

              Which is not what I was doing, I was explaining how you are absolving a monster because someone else would have done it eventually (ignoring the fact that his atrocities were so awful that the Spanish royals even told him to cut that shit out, literally bringing him back to Spain in chains).

              Even Mike Godwin thinks you’ve missed the point:

              My feeling was that the more people got into this habit, the less likely that people remembered the historical context of all this. And as you know, one of the injunctions of Holocaust historians is that we must never forget, we have to remember. And I just thought, Well, I’m going to do a little experiment and see if I could make people remember.

              https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/03/godwins-law-mike-godwin-hitler-nazi-comparisons.html

              I was literally putting something in historical context and literally talking about the actual Holocaust.

              But the main thing is that Columbus was so bad that even people at the time said he was a monster:

              Bobadilla collected the testimonies of 23 people who had seen or heard about the treatment meted out by Columbus and his brothers. “Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place,” Ms Varela said.

              Columbus and his brothers were forced to travel back to Spain. Columbus was in chains but, although he never recovered his titles, he was set free and allowed to sail back to the Caribbean.

              “Columbus and his brothers come across in the text as tyrants,” Ms Varela said. "Now one can understand why he was sacked and we can see that there were good reasons for doing so.

              “The monarchs wanted someone who did not give them problems. Columbus did not solve problems, he created them.”

              https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/aug/07/books.spain

              I’m sure you’ll continue to try to do this silly “we can’t vilify Columbus for starting off centuries of genocide and oppression because someone else just as bad could have come along,” but hopefully everyone else will figure out that he was one of the greatest monsters in human history.