The idea that Christopher Columbus was a Jew is based on a preposterous chain of evidence

 

 The chain of custody of the body is hopelessly broken. We know nothing about its integrity over almost 400 years before the 20th century.

"there are traits compatible with Jewish origin" ... The DNA-driven results are “almost absolutely reliable" ... Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506 but had wished to be buried on the island of Hispaniola ... His remains were taken there in 1542, then at least some of them moved to Cuba in 1795 and then to Seville in 1898."

Story here.

Buon Giorno Di Cristoforo Colombo!

 

Scalping existed in South Dakota 142 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue

 

America: The most English, the most German, the most Protestant, the most guilt-ridden this Columbus Day

 

... the idea that Britain might celebrate, say, Cecil Rhodes in the way that Spain does Columbus seems almost heretical. The English-speaking peoples evince a peculiar compulsion to apologize for their overseas victories — a compulsion not much shared by Arabs or Portuguese or Russians or Turks or Italians. When it comes to self-criticism, only the Germans give us a run for our money.

Why should that be? Is it some curious manifestation of Protestant guilt? Is it that Anglosphere universities, unusually, remove students from their families and their hometowns, leaving them in each other’s company and making them unusually vulnerable to purity spirals and silly ideas? Or is it simply that everyone loves an underdog and the English-speaking peoples are almost never underdogs?

Whatever the explanation, we have reached a strange cultural moment when the countries that did the most to spread personal freedom and representative government across the globe are also the ones most embarrassed about their achievements.

 

More.

Maybe the barbarism of Spain in the New World had something to do with its 800-year experience of Islam before Columbus

From "Islamic Spain in Middle Ages no paradise for Christians, Jews, women" by Paul Monk here:

The real thrust of Fernandez-Morera’s critique of the myth of Andalusia is that Islam in Spain, far from setting a high bar of tolerance, was characterised by plunder, domination, the harsh application of sharia law, the persecution of Christians or Jews who openly avowed their non-Muslim beliefs, and the violent suppression of ‘‘heresies’’ and apostasy within the Muslim community. ... There is no Andalusian golden age of Islam to emulate.

Bioarchaeologist blames mass child sacrifice by Chimú "civilization" in Peru in AD 1468 on the weather

And don't forget boys and girls, the real villain in the new world was the European, beginning with Christopher Columbus not three decades later, according to the author of your kid's high school history book, Howard Zinn:

How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? 

From the story here in National Geographic:

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño. ...

Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region, at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim." 


Meanwhile, "ancient" ain't what it used to be (anything before 476 AD, the fall of the Western Roman Empire), perhaps because the arc of human barbarism keeps interfering with that other one bending toward justice somebody recently immortalized.