Thoughts on this?
A new documentary explores 20 years of research into the navigator’s roots, suggesting his birthplace is in the ‘western Mediterranean’
english.elpais.com
=Their evidence basically boils down to "the genetics don't support any speculated familial connections in the other origins (so?) + his son's Y-DNA and mtDNA (the latter of which isn't even inherited from the father) are possibly sephardi". Also they say he has Sephardi Y-DNA but "West Mediterranean" DNA (in genomics, usually refers to component strong in french, spanish, basque, sards) as well, which is contradictory unless Columbus is a Marrano of mixed ancestry, or he is only of distant Sephardi ancestry, or more likely he is actually an Italian guy with a haplogroup that both Italians and Sephardic Jews have because a large chunk of the Sephardi genepool comes from Imperial Romans!
The only damning evidence would be if
A) Columbus's autosomal DNA had strong indication he was sephardic (currently, it isn't even clear if they retrieved any autosomal DNA rom Columbus or his son)
B) Columbus's Y-DNA is a specifically sephardic clade not found at high rates in other Mediterranean populations. Which, I doubt. Because Sephardi are not as bottlenecked as Ashkenazim and especially not before the expulsion. And also, because Columbus's remains were in poor condition (literally a pile of bone fragments) and they had repeatedly failed to extract DNA from them over the past 20 years.
Recall the past. Recall when they said that Hitler was Jewish and Negro because he was E1b, only for the vast majority of Austrians with E1b at the time to be... Wait for it.. Austrian gentiles! These clowns will take anything and use it to prove their ethnonarcissistic catalonian delusions. Columbus was an Italian. Everyone around him recognized he was Italian. He spoke in Italian and particularly Ligurian in many of his notes. The physical description of him is very European (tall, red-haired, blue eyed, ruddy skin), and would fit much more in Northern Italy than among Sephardi. If he had Jewish ancestry, I would still be hard pressed to believe that it was Spanish Jewry and not Italian Jewry that contributed. But, I don't believe he had recent Jewish ancestry.