The implications extended beyond the lock itself. Any conclusion about Beethoven’s lead exposure, or any aspect of his health, that had been drawn from the Hiller Lock needed to be revisited using authenticated material.
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## Five Locks, One Genome
Against the rejection of the Hiller Lock, the 2023 study’s authentication of five other samples stands as its most methodologically important achievement.
The five locks—drawn from the Stumpff Lock, the Moscheles Lock, the Halm-Thayer Lock, the Bermann Lock, and the Müller Lock—all yielded DNA that matched each other. The profiles shared the same genetic ancestry, the same male sex chromosome configuration, and the same distinctive features that allowed researchers to treat them as coming from a single individual. Population analysis placed that individual’s ancestry in close correspondence with present-day inhabitants of the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany—the area that includes Bonn, the city where Beethoven was born.
This coherence across five independent samples, drawn from locks with distinct provenance histories spanning different collectors across different countries and different decades, provided the authentication backbone of the study. The probability that five unrelated locks from different institutional collections would all produce matching genetic profiles from the same male individual with the same ancestry, and that this individual was not Beethoven, was considered by the researchers to be negligibly small.
The Stumpff Lock provided the most complete genetic material and served as the primary source for the full genome sequence. From it, the team reconstructed approximately two-thirds of Beethoven’s genome—a substantial achievement for DNA this old, extracted from hair rather than from bone or tooth material, which typically preserves ancient DNA better.