Europe’s Orphan

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On Whit Monday, 1828, a teenage boy appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the German city of Nuremberg. He could barely speak, but he was carrying two letters claiming that he was kept in isolation his entire childhood. His name, he said, was Kaspar Hauser.

The boy soon became a celebrity, with newspapers calling him the “orphan of Europe.” Then, people speculated that Kaspar was the son of a German prince, a myth that survived nearly two centuries.

“It’s claimed to be one of the biggest historical mysteries of the 19th century,” said geneticist Turi King from the University of Bath.

Now, King and her team established that Kaspar Hauser was, in fact, not related to the House of Baden.

The only surviving son of Carl, Grand Duke of Baden, died shortly after birth in 1812. The conspiracy theory had it that Carl’s son was actually Kaspar, who was kidnapped as a baby and swapped out with a dying child to alter the royal lineage.

Kaspar was eventually stabbed to death on Dec. 14, 1833, after nightfall.

In their study, King and her colleagues looked at bloodstains left on his clothes from that evening. The stains had already been analyzed in the late 20th century without much fanfare.

Comparing it with samples of Kaspar’s hair, the team could prove the authenticity of the bloodstains for the first time, seeing that the DNA was the same across both samples.

New forensic technologies then enabled them to observe his mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother’s line. When compared with samples from the House of Baden, there was no match.

The discovery put to bed, once and for all, the controversial “Prince theory.”

Still, no one knows where the orphan of Europe came from. “His mitochondrial DNA type is one that’s Westeurasian but we can’t narrow it down to a geographical region,” King said.