DNA of 'Lost European Prince' reveals 200-year-old conspiracy

In 1828, a "half-wild" 16-year-old took the continent by storm when he appeared out of nowhere in the German city of Nuremberg. The disheveled teenager carried two letters claiming he had grown up in a dark and cold dungeon, the captive of a "mysterious man."

For 200 years, the story of whether this boy was really a prince remained a mystery. But today's technology has made it possible to find out, Science Alert writes.

Thanks to modern sequencing methods, experts managed to prove that there were no matches with the DNA of his alleged royal sisters and their descendants.

According to historical data, the only surviving son of the Grand Duke died as an infant in 1812. However, with the sudden appearance of Caspar Hauser (that's what the lad called himself when he arrived on the continent), some began to claim that he was the son of the recently deceased Grand Duke Charles, who had been a prince in Baden, a territory in southern Germany, before the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. And may have been kidnapped as an infant and exchanged with a dying child "to bring a sideline to the throne."

Five years after his mysterious appearance, the guy was murdered, adding even more intrigue to his case and inspiring hundreds of articles, books, movies and plays over the decades.

"It's believed to be one of the greatest historical mysteries of the 19th century," says geneticist Turi King, who was one of the researchers who joined an international team of scientists trying to find out once and for all whether the lad was the son of Duke Charles.

Previous attempts to do so have yielded conflicting results, with some scientists denying whether the bloodstains taken from Hauser's underwear on the day of the wound were real.

"After death, our DNA degrades into shorter and shorter fragments until there is nothing left for sequencing. The DNA analysis methods available in the 1990s and early 2000s worked well with long DNA fragments, but did not produce consistent results when analyzing the DNA of the guy's various items," King explains.

Using Hauser's blood and hair samples, scientists re-analyzed the young man's maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA using modern sequencing techniques. In this way, they found that Kaspar Hauser's DNA was the same in the hair samples and also matched the blood analysis from the 1990s, confirming the authenticity of the samples for the first time.

However, by comparing Hauser's mtDNA with that of his alleged royal sisters and their descendants, the scientists found no matches. This leads to the conclusion that Hauser's genes are different from the mitochondrial lineage of the House of Baden. So he wasn't a descendant of the royal family. But also to find out who this guy really was, scientists have no way of knowing:

"Unfortunately, our data still can't tell us who he was. His type of mitochondrial DNA is West Asian, but we can not narrow it down to a geographic region," - explains the expert.

Earlier OBOZ.UA told that a ten-year-old girl found traces of dinosaurs aged 200 million years, playing on the beach.

Only verified information we have in Telegram-channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes!