The 2024 DNA study does not resolve this dimension of the case. The study’s authors noted explicitly that the exclusion of the Baden prince theory does not mean Hauser was a fraud. He could have been a genuine victim of severe childhood abuse or neglect whose actual identity — not of royal origin — was never established. The two questions separate.
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## Turi King: From Richard III to Kaspar Hauser
The name that connected the 2024 Kaspar Hauser study to a previous high-profile ancient DNA identification was Professor Turi King, then of the University of Leicester and subsequently director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath.
King had previously co-led the analysis of skeletal remains found under a Leicester car park in 2012, which were identified through DNA comparison as the remains of King Richard III — the English monarch who died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. That identification, which used mitochondrial DNA comparison with living descendants of Richard’s sister in the maternal line, became one of the most widely publicized ancient DNA findings of the century and demonstrated the potential of forensic ancient DNA to resolve long-standing historical questions.
The Kaspar Hauser collaboration brought her expertise to a problem that was structurally similar: an ancient biological sample, a claimed royal identity, and the need to verify whether the genetic evidence supported or excluded the specific claim. The methodology in both cases relied on mitochondrial DNA and maternal-line descendant comparisons.
The outcome in the two cases was different in its direction — Richard III was identified, Kaspar Hauser was excluded from the specific theory — but similar in its epistemic character: both studies used the available genetic evidence to do what the evidence could actually do, neither overstating nor understating the conclusion. King’s public statement after the Hauser study was characteristically precise: “One where we proved the identification of a king and one where we proved someone wasn’t a prince.” The asymmetry was real. Proving an identity requires a match; excluding a theory requires a non-match.