A handful of people alive today can truthfully say they’re related to Leonardo da Vinci. An extensive new study published in the journal Human Evolution has comprehensively retraced the late great Renaissance man’s family tree to discover that he still has 14 living relatives. Some of them even still live near his hometown of Vinci, Italy. To confirm the living relatives, the study authors traced da Vinci’s heritage back 690 years, carefully comparing the Y chromosome of those living to their ancient ancestors.

Da Vinci — remembered for his overall genius as well as his paintings, sculpture and scientific discoveries — lived from 1452 to 1519. “They are aged between 1 and 85, they don’t live right in Vinci but in neighboring municipalities as far as Versilia (on the Tuscan coast) and they have ordinary jobs like a clerk, a surveyor, an artisan,” study author Alessandro Vezzosi told Italian news outlet Ansa.

The finding is the result of a decade of research by Vezzosi and co-author Agnese Sabato, which not only answers lingering questions about da Vinci’s genealogy but corrects some errors in previous research. The living descendants are all the products of da Vinci’s relatives, including at least 22 half-brothers, as the polymath1 had no children.

(www.nypost.com, 14.07.2021. Adaptado.) ¹polymath: a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning.

De acordo com o contexto apresentado no terceiro parágrafo, o trecho “as the polymath had no children” pode ser entendido como: