For Kaspar Hauser, whose case attracted intense public interest during his lifetime, this preservation impulse produced multiple locks of hair in different hands. Some were given directly by people who had known him. Some changed hands over generations. Some ended up with families whose connection to the original circumstances had become attenuated. By 2019, when the Innsbruck team began their collection, three privately held locks with documented provenance histories were available for analysis.
The provenance documentation for such samples is never as clean as a museum’s formal collection records. The chain of custody over nearly two centuries, passing through different families and sometimes different countries, involves informal transfers, undocumented inheritances, and gaps that cannot be retrospectively filled. The researchers were aware of this. It is one of the reasons they analyzed multiple locks rather than relying on a single sample, and one of the reasons the consistency of results across different samples with different histories was central to their authentication argument.
The comparison between museum-held samples and privately held samples is not straightforwardly in favor of either. Museums provide institutional chain of custody and conservation standards, but they also expose samples to decades of handling by multiple individuals who leave their own DNA on artifacts. Private collections may have less formal documentation but can represent more continuous single-family custody that reduces the number of people who have had physical contact with the material. The 2024 study’s decision to work with privately held locks, combined with the PEC MPS methodology’s ability to distinguish fragmented ancient DNA from intact modern DNA, was well suited to the specific authentication challenge.