Saturday marked the 500th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus. To commemorate the event a team of forensic scientists, led by Spanish geneticist Jose Antonio Lorente, have spent the past three years analyzing DNA taken from bone fragments reported to belong to Columbus in an effort to answer the mysteries surrounding the birth and burial of the famed explorer. Where was he born? Is he Italian, Jewish, or ? Does the grave in Seville, Spain, hold the remains of the famed explorer, or does Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic hold bragging rights to his final resting place?

At least one of those century-old debates appears to finally have an answer - at least sort of. The team of Spanish scientists are now fairly confident that at least some of Christopher Columbus' remains lie buried inside a cathedral in Seville, Spain. Mitochondrial DNA taken from the Seville tomb of Columbus matches that of DNA taken from the remains known to be from Columbus' brother, Diego, who is also buried there. "There is absolute matchup between the mitochondrial DNA we have studied from Columbus' brother and Christopher Columbus," said Marcial Castro, a Seville-area historian and high school teacher who is the mastermind behind the project, which began in 2002.

That doesn't mean that Santo Domingo is out of the running, however. Castro said that although Columbus has now been proven to be buried in Spain, it is also likely that some of his remains could still lie in Santo Domingo. Columbus traveled almost as much after death as he did in life. He was first buried in Valladolid, Spain, when he died, and his remains were later moved to a monastery near Seville. When Columbus' eldest son, Diego, died in 1526, he was buried beside his father.

In 1537, honoring the wishes of Columbus - expressed in his will - to be buried in the Americas, Diego's widow petitioned the Spanish court to move both Columbus and his son across the Atlantic to the cathedral in Santo Domingo where they rested for over two centuries. In 1795, the bones were again moved - to Havana, Cuba - to protect them from the "foreigners" as Spain seceded Hispanolia to France. There they remained for over 100 years, until the Spanish-American War prompted their removal back to the cathedral in Seville, Spain.

In the meantime, workers digging in the Santo Domingo cathedral in 1877 found a lead casket containing bone fragments and a bullet and bearing the inscription "The Illustrious and Prominent Varon Don Cristobal Colon," the Spanish name for Christopher Columbus. Thus it isn't too much of a stretch to believe that some of Columbus' bones remained behind in Santo Domingo - either accidentally, or through the work of some sentimental Dominican caretaker who wanted to ensure "that at least part of the explorer would never leave the city that he founded, governed and named for his father."

Castro says the team is now focusing their DNA analysis on another Columbus mystery: his country of origin. Traditional theory says he was from Genoa, Italy, but others argue that Columbus was actually from the Catalonia region of northeast Spain. Other versions of the story have Columbus as a Catalan Jew who fled to Genoa to hide from the Spanish Inquisition, and the illegitimate son of Spain's prince of Viana, born in Majorca. The scientists have collected hundreds of samples from Spanish men sharing the surname Colón (Columbus) in the effort to find a common link to the great explorer. Their DNA will be compared to DNA from the identified bones of Hernando — Columbus' son through an extramarital affair — to see if they carry the same Y-chromosome markers, identifying them as a descendant.