The team acquired hair samples from three privately owned locks attributed to Kaspar Hauser, collected between 2019 and 2021. These locks had different provenance histories and had been held in private collections rather than museum storage. The hair was analyzed individually — strand by strand rather than pooled — to allow checking for consistency between individual samples and to detect any contamination from different sources.
The Innsbruck laboratory used a method called Primer Extension Capture Massively Parallel Sequencing, or PEC MPS. This technique is designed for highly fragmented DNA. It can recover sequence information from fragments too short for conventional analysis, and it includes analytical controls that help identify whether any sequences recovered represent the authentic ancient material or more recent contamination. Because older DNA tends to produce shorter fragments, the method can flag younger contaminating DNA by its relatively intact fragment length.
Independently, a second analysis was conducted at the University of Potsdam, where Michael Hofreiter led a laboratory specializing in ancient DNA. The Potsdam group received one of the hair locks — specifically, the lock that had also been analyzed in the original Münster study — without being told the samples came from Kaspar Hauser. This blind testing was a methodological control: if the Potsdam lab produced the same result as Innsbruck without knowing the source, the consistency would significantly strengthen confidence in the finding.
The results from both laboratories were the same.
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## What the 2024 Analysis Found
Kaspar Hauser’s mitochondrial DNA belongs to haplogroup W.
Haplogroup W is a designation within the phylogenetic classification of mitochondrial DNA — a grouping of related sequences that share a common ancestral origin in the maternal line. It is found across Europe and parts of western Asia, occurring at a frequency of approximately 0.2 percent in European populations. It is not particularly common, but it is not rare enough to identify a specific geographic origin, and it is not uncommon enough to be the basis for any claim about where Hauser came from.