(CNN) – “His birth was unknown, his death was hidden.”
So reads the tombstone (translated from Latin) on the grave of the enigmatic man known as Kaspar Hauser, who died in the year 1833. Nearly 200 years later, scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about Hauser’s alleged ties to the German royalty.
Hauser appeared seemingly out of nowhere in what is now Nuremberg, Germany, on May 26, 1828, when he was about 16 years old. He was found wandering the town square without identification and with an unsigned letter in his hand.
The letter and Hauser’s fragmented memories told a harrowing story: that he grew up in a narrow dungeon from which he never left and was fed and kept clean by a benefactor whom he never saw. When the teenage Hauser appeared in the center of town, he could barely write his own name and could barely communicate with the officials interrogating him.
Thus was born a fantastic story, suggesting that Hauser was a kidnapped prince of local legend, stolen from the royal family of Baden, then a sovereign state in what is now southwestern Germany. There was no evidence to support this theory, but rumors persisted, endearing Hauser to members of fashionable European society and causing him to become a local celebrity.
Long after Hauser’s death, scholars searched in vain for any evidence of his royal ancestry. In the mid-1990s, genetic data from preserved blood samples from Hauser suggested that he was not part of the Baden lineage. But these results were soon contradicted by tests a few years later that analyzed Hauser’s hair.
Recently, scientists found more definitive answers through a new analysis of Hauser’s hair samples, according to research published in the journal iScience. Their approach, developed for ancient Neanderthal DNA fragments, was more sensitive than previous methods.
When they analyzed Hauser’s mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA—genetic code passed down the maternal line—they confirmed that it did not match the mtDNA of members of the Baden family. Nearly two centuries after Hauser’s mysterious appearance, this discovery ruled out the possibility that he was a kidnapped prince.
The new analysis “exemplifies how molecular genetics can unravel historical mysteries,” said Dr. Dmitry Temiakov, a professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
“This is a very comprehensive study,” said Temiakov, who was not involved in the research. “He took into account all previous data, examined and explained discrepancies in DNA sequencing analyzes that took place at different times and were performed by different methods, presented new data, and carefully estimated the probability of an individual matching a lineage.” particular”.
Unraveling DNA
The lab that performed the new analysis has worked for nearly two decades to improve techniques for studying highly degraded DNA, said study lead author and forensic molecular biologist Dr. Walther Parson, a researcher at the National DNA Database Laboratory. Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior in Innsbruck, Austria.
For their study, the scientists first reviewed previous findings about Hauser. In 1996, a laboratory in Munich, Germany, analyzed blood from Hauser’s underwear. (He died of a knife wound, and his blood-stained clothes are preserved in a museum in Ansbach, Germany.) According to the Munich lab, the mtDNA in Hauser’s blood did not match Baden’s mtDNA. However, some researchers who supported the “lost prince” hypothesis claimed that the blood might not have belonged to Hauser, Parson told CNN.
“It has been said that the curators of the museum where Kaspar Hauser’s pants were displayed would renew the bloodstain to make it look better,” adding fresh blood from a different source, he said. “If that were the case, the new blood would mask the old blood and would most likely have different mitochondrial DNA.”
In the early 2000s, another laboratory in Münster, Germany, analyzed samples of Hauser’s hair. Those results showed that Hauser’s mtDNA closely matched that of the Badens, contradicting the Munich findings.
“They were at a stalemate,” Parson said.
Parson’s lab performed a new analysis of Hauser’s hair, using strands collected before and after his death. The hairs were documented extensively and could be authenticated with more certainty than blood samples, Parson said. Additionally, the lab’s highly sensitive technique allowed the researchers to ensure that they were sampling the hair shafts, where useful mtDNA was located, and that the samples were not contaminated.
“With the improved sequencing method, we were able to obtain sequences of the highly degraded component,” delivering results with a much stronger signal than in the previous hair analysis, Parson said. The new results matched those of the 1996 blood test, finding that Hauser’s mitotype—a set of mitochondrial alleles for different genes—was type W. The Badens’ mitotype was type H.
“That changes the picture, because now the hair samples give the same result as the blood sample,” Parson said.
To confirm their results, the researchers sent locks of hair to a third laboratory, in Potsdam, Germany, that specialized in ancient DNA but did not tell the scientists there that the sample was Hauser’s. The Potsdam blind analysis also returned the type W mitotype for the Hauser sample.
“The consistency of the data across three independent laboratories further reinforces the study’s conclusions,” Temiakov added.
According to the “prince theory,” Hauser’s parents were Grand Duke Carl and Grand Duchess Stéphanie de Beauharnais. The Grand Duchess gave birth to a son on September 29, 1812, and the unnamed child died when she was 18 days old.
However, some whispered that the deceased baby was another boy, exchanged by the two-week-old prince for his stepmother, Countess Louise Caroline von Hochberg. The theory goes that the real prince—the man who later called himself Kaspar Hauser—was then hidden. When Carl and Stéphanie failed to produce a male heir, one of Countess Hochberg’s sons ascended to the grand ducal throne.
The new findings about Hauser not only disprove the prince theory; They also demonstrate the importance of pushing DNA analysis technologies to the limit, Parson said. “That, of course, has an impact on how we continue to work on mitochondrial DNA in forensic human identification cases,” he added.
But if Hauser wasn’t a “lost prince,” who was he? It’s impossible to know from mtDNA evidence, which could only associate it with a Western European lineage, according to the study.
In the Ansbach cemetery where Hauser is buried, his tombstone describes him as “the enigma of his time.” Whoever Hauser was, however, is an enigma that has yet to be solved.
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazine.
