“His birth was unknown, his death hidden”

This phrase, translated from Latin, is inscribed on the tombstone of an enigmatic man named Caspar Hauser, who died in 1833.

Some 200 years after his death, scientists have finally solved the mystery of Hauser’s ties to the German royal family.

Who was the mystery man Kaspar Hauser – The unsolved mystery surrounding his name

Hauser “sprouted” 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 some fragmentary memories of him unfolded a chilling story:

He grew up in a narrow dungeon, from which he had never come out, and was fed by a benefactor, whom he never got to see. Now a teenager, Heiser suddenly appeared in the center of the city and did not even know how to write his name. In fact, he barely communicated with the officials who interrogated him.

Little by little a story took root well in the bosom of society. There was a rumor that Hauser was a prince kidnapped by the royal family of Baden, then a dominant state in what is now southwestern Germany.

There was no evidence to support this theory, but the rumors persisted. Hauser became well-liked by members of fashionable European society and was considered something of a local celebrity.

What the new DNA study revealed

Long after Hauser’s death, scholars searched in vain for any evidence of his royal parentage. In the mid-1990s, genetic data from Hauser’s preserved blood samples suggested that he was not part of Baden’s ancestry. But these results were soon contradicted by tests a few years later that took a sample of Hauser’s hair.

Recently, scientists found 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 on the mother’s side – they confirmed that it did not match mtDNA from Baden’s family members. Almost two centuries after Hauser’s mysterious appearance, this find ruled out the possibility that he was an abducted prince.

The lab that conducted 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, researcher at the National DNA Database Laboratory of the Federal Ministry of Austria. Interior in Innsbruck, Austria.

For their study, the scientists first looked at previous findings about Hauser. In 1996, a laboratory in Munich, Germany analyzed blood from Hauser’s underwear. (He died of a stab wound, and his bloodstained clothes are kept 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 may not have belonged to Hauser, Parson told CNN.

The enigma of his time

According to the “prince theory”, Hauser’s parents were Grand Duke Karl and Duchess Stephanie de Beauharnais. The 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 infant was another baby, 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 – then went into hiding. When Carl and Stéphanie subsequently 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’s theory. they also demonstrate the importance of pushing the limits of DNA analysis technologies, Parson said. “This, of course, has an impact on how we continue to work on mitochondrial DNA in human identification cases in forensics,” he added.

But if Hauser wasn’t a “lost prince,” who was? It’s impossible to tell from the mtDNA evidence, which could only link him to a Western European ancestry, 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.