Third, the blind replication at Potsdam — the second laboratory that analyzed one of the locks without being told its source and produced the same result — added an additional layer of confidence. The consistency across independent analyses with different methods is the most robust kind of verification available in ancient DNA work.
None of this constitutes absolute certainty. Ancient DNA analysis is a probabilistic science. But the methodological approach to authentication in the 2024 study was more rigorous than anything applied to this case previously.
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## What the Study Does Not Do
The scope of what the 2024 DNA study does and does not establish is worth laying out specifically, because media coverage of historical DNA findings sometimes overstates what the science can determine.
The study excludes the maternal Baden connection. It does not exclude any other theory of Kaspar Hauser’s origin. A person can be of unknown identity, have been raised in an abusive and isolated environment, and have suffered a violent death without being a Baden prince. All of those things can be true of Kaspar Hauser regardless of his genetic identity.
The study does not establish where Hauser came from. Haplogroup W occurs across Europe and parts of western Asia. It is relatively uncommon, but its distribution does not allow any geographic narrowing of Hauser’s origin. The study explicitly rules out the claim, made in a 2018 publication by a researcher named Günter Hesse, that mtDNA from Hauser samples could establish a Tyrolean origin. It cannot. A haplogroup with broad distribution across a continent cannot be used to identify a specific region, and the authors of the 2024 study said so directly.