New DNA Analysis Reveals Mystery of ‘Lost Prince’ Kaspar Hauser

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“His birth was unknown, his death hidden.”

That’s what can be read on the tombstone (translated from Latin) marking the grave of the enigmatic man known as Kaspar Hauser, who died in 1833. Nearly 200 years later, scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about Hauser’s alleged ties to German royalty.

Hauser appeared 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 with no identification papers and an unsigned letter in his hand.

Hauser’s letter and fragmentary memories tell a harrowing story: He grew up in a cramped dungeon he never left, and was fed and cared for by a benefactor he never saw. When Hauser arrived downtown as a teenager, he could barely write his own name and was barely able to communicate with the officials who interrogated him.

A fantastical story took root, suggesting that Hauser was a kidnapped prince of local legend, descended 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 the rumors persisted, endearing Hauser to fashionable members of European society and making him a local celebrity.

Long after Hauser’s death, researchers searched in vain for any evidence of royal parentage. In the mid-1990s, genetic data from preserved blood samples of Hauser suggested that he was not of Baden lineage. But these results were quickly contradicted by tests conducted a few years later on samples of Hauser’s hair.

Recently, scientists found definitive answers through a new analysis of Hauser’s hair samples, according to a study published in the journal iScience. Their approach, developed for ancient fragments of Neanderthal DNA, proved more sensitive than previous methods.

By analyzing Hauser’s mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA (genetic code passed down from the mother), 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 rules out the possibility that he was a kidnapped prince.

The new analysis “illustrates how molecular genetics can solve 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. “It took into account all previous data, examined and explained discrepancies in DNA sequencing analyses that took place at different times and were performed by different methods, presented new data, and carefully estimated the probability that an individual corresponds to a particular lineage.”

Deciphering DNA

The lab that conducted the new analysis has worked for nearly two decades to improve techniques for studying highly degraded DNA, said the study’s lead author and forensic molecular biologist Dr. Walther Parson, a researcher at the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior’s National DNA Database Laboratory in Innsbruck, Austria.

For their study, the scientists first looked at previous findings on Hauser. In 1996, a lab in Munich, Germany, analyzed blood from Hauser’s underwear. (He died of a knife wound, and his blood-stained clothes are housed 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 have argued that the blood may not have belonged to Hauser, Parson told CNN.

“It is said that the curators of the museum where Kaspar Hauser’s trousers were displayed renewed the bloodstain to make it look better,” by adding fresh blood from another source, he explained. “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 lab in Münster, Germany, analyzed hair samples from Hauser. The results showed that Hauser’s mtDNA closely matched that of the Badens, contradicting the Munich findings.

“They were at an impasse,” Parson said.

Royal hoax debunked

Parson’s lab reanalyzed Hauser’s hair, using strands taken before and after his death. The hair was extensively documented and could be authenticated with more certainty than the blood samples, Parson said. In addition, the lab’s highly sensitive technique allowed researchers to be confident that they were collecting samples from the hair shafts, where the 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,” which yielded results with a much stronger signal than in the previous hair analysis, Parson said. The new results matched those of the 1996 blood test, revealing that the Hauser mitotype — a set of mitochondrial alleles for different genes — was type W. The Baden mitotype was type H.

“This is a game changer because now hair samples give the same result as the blood sample,” Parson said.

To confirm their results, the researchers sent strands of hair to a third lab in Potsdam, Germany, that specializes in ancient DNA, but did not tell the scientists that they were Hauser’s hair. The blind analysis in Potsdam also revealed the W-type mitotype for Hauser’s sample.

“The consistency of data from three independent laboratories further strengthens the study’s conclusions,” Temiakov added.

“The enigma of his time”

According to the “prince theory,” Hauser’s parents were Grand Duke Carl and Grand Duchess Stephanie de Beauharnais. The Grand Duchess gave birth to a son on September 29, 1812, and the child, whose name is unknown, died at the age of 18 days.

Some have whispered, however, that the dead baby was another baby, swapped for the two-week-old prince by his step-grandmother, Countess Louise Caroline von Hochberg. The theory is that the real prince, the man who would later be called Kaspar Hauser, was hidden. When Carl and Stephanie failed to produce a male heir, one of Countess Hochberg’s sons ascended the grand ducal throne.

The new findings about Hauser not only debunk the prince theory; they also demonstrate the importance of pushing the boundaries of DNA analysis technologies, Parson said. “This of course has an impact on how we continue to work with mitochondrial DNA in human forensic identification cases,” he added.

But if Hauser was not a “lost prince,” who was he? It is impossible to tell from the mtDNA evidence, which can only link him to a Western European lineage, the study says.

In the Ansbach cemetery where Hauser lies, his tombstone describes him as “the enigma of his time.” But who Hauser was is a riddle that remains 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.

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