Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more.
“His birth was unknown, his death hidden.”
So reads the inscription 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 the German royal family.
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 carrying an unsigned letter.
The letter and Hauser’s fragmented memories told a harrowing story: of growing up in a cramped dungeon he never left, of being fed and cleaned by a benefactor he never saw. When the teenage Hauser turned up in the city center, he could barely write his own name and could barely communicate with officers who interrogated him.
A fantastic story arose suggesting that Hauser was a kidnapped prince from local lore, abducted 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, scholars searched in vain for any evidence of royal descent. In the mid-1990s, genetic data from samples of Hauser’s preserved blood suggested that he was not part of the Baden line. But these results were soon contradicted by tests taken from samples of Hauser’s hair several years later.
Scientists recently found definitive answers through new analyses of Hauser’s hair samples, according to research published in the journal iScience. Their approach, developed on ancient fragments of Neanderthal DNA, was more sensitive than previous methods.
When they analyzed Hauser’s mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA — genetic code passed down from the mother — they confirmed that it did not match mtDNA from Baden relatives. Nearly two centuries after Hauser’s mysterious appearance, this finding ruled out the possibility that he was a kidnapped prince.
The new analysis “is an example of 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. “(It) took into account all previous data, examined and explained the discrepancies in DNA sequence analyses that took place at different times and were performed with different methods, presented new data, and carefully estimated the probability that an individual fits a particular lineage.”
Unraveling DNA
The laboratory that performed the new analysis has been working for nearly two decades to improve techniques for studying severely degraded DNA, said lead researcher and forensic molecular biologist Dr. Walther Parson, a researcher at the National DNA Database Laboratory of the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior 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 from a stab wound, and his blood-stained clothing is 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 have argued that the blood may not have been Hauser’s, 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,” he said, adding that there was fresh blood from another source. “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, tested hair samples from Hauser. Those results showed that Hauser’s mtDNA was a good match to that of the Badens, contradicting the Munich findings.
“They were at a stalemate,” Parson said.
A royal hoax debunked
Parsons’ lab conducted a new analysis of Hauser’s hair, using strands collected before and after his death. The hairs were extensively documented and could be verified with more certainty than the blood samples, Parson said. In addition, the lab’s extremely sensitive technique allowed researchers to be sure they were sampling the hair shafts, where the usable mtDNA was located, and that the samples were free of contamination.
“With the improved sequencing method, we were able to obtain sequences of the highly degraded component,” yielding results with a much stronger signal than the previous hair analysis, Parson said. The new results matched those of the 1996 blood analysis, which determined 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,” says Parson.
To confirm their results, the researchers sent hair strands to a third lab — in Potsdam, Germany — that specialized in ancient DNA but did not tell the scientists there that the sample was Hauser’s. The blind analysis in Potsdam also yielded the W mitochondria for the Hauser sample.
“The consistency of the data from three independent laboratories further strengthens the conclusions of the study,” Temiakov added.
‘The mystery of his time’
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 29 September 1812, and the unnamed child died when he was 18 days old.
However, some whispered that the dead baby was another infant, swapped for the 2-week-old prince by his step-grandmother, Countess Louise Caroline von Hochberg. The theory goes that the real prince—the man who later called himself Kaspar Hauser—was then hidden away. When Carl and Stéphanie then failed to produce a male heir, one of Countess Hochberg’s sons ascended to the Grand Duke’s throne.
The new Hauser findings not only disprove the Prince theory; they also demonstrate the importance of pushing the boundaries of DNA analysis technologies, Parson said. “That obviously has implications for how we continue to work on mitochondrial DNA in human identification cases in forensics,” he added.
But if Hauser wasn’t a “lost prince,” then who was he? It’s impossible to figure that out from the mtDNA evidence, which could only associate him with a Western European ancestry, the study said.
In the cemetery of Ansbach, where Hauser is buried, his gravestone describes him as “the enigma of his time.” Whoever Hauser was, however, it is a mystery that has not yet been solved.
Mindy Weisberger is a science journalist and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazine.
For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com