Turi King, at the University of Bath, contributed expertise in the specific application of ancient DNA methods to historical identification questions and provided access to or facilitation of the comparison against Stéphanie de Beauharnais’s living female-line descendants.
The other co-authors — including researchers from multiple German forensic institutes — contributed various technical, historical, and institutional aspects of the study. The long co-author list reflects the collaborative nature of a project that required expertise in ancient DNA extraction, sequencing, bioinformatics, forensic genetics, and historical methodology.
The study’s peer review was conducted by *iScience*, which is a part of the Cell Press family of journals. *iScience* publishes across multiple scientific disciplines and was described in the paper’s context as particularly appropriate for a study that crossed the boundaries of forensic science, evolutionary biology, and historical investigation. The paper was published August 12, 2024.
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## The Kaspar Hauser Experiment in Ethology
One of the more striking afterlives of the Kaspar Hauser case is in the science of animal behavior — ethology — where the name has been attached to a type of developmental experiment that researchers have conducted since the mid-twentieth century.
A “Kaspar Hauser experiment” in ethology involves raising an animal in complete isolation from others of its own species, particularly from adults who could transmit learned behaviors. The purpose is to study which behaviors are innate — encoded in the animal’s genetics and expressed regardless of experience — and which are learned through social exposure and imitation.
These experiments have been conducted with birds, particularly in the study of song learning. A bird raised without hearing the songs of its species will sometimes develop a song, but that song differs in systematic ways from the normal song of the species. The comparison between the isolated bird’s song and the normal song illuminates which aspects of song production are determined by genetic inheritance and which by learning.