Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven (2023)
cell.com46 points by petercooper a day ago
46 points by petercooper a day ago
It's kind of crazy that we can pull Beethoven’s health history and even family secrets? out of a few strands of hair...
Particularly since cut hair doesn't even contain DNA. Or at least that's what is claimed by random web sites if you ask a search engine. Never mind a full genomic analysis, even for forensic purposes it is claimed that you need hair with the follicle attached. Is that still true, or is that claim now out of date, I wonder.
Well, they managed to analyze DNA from centuries-old hair in this paper.
From the methods section:
> Nuclear DNA in hair has an extremely low average fragment length owing to the activity of endonucleases expressed during hair formation.
But the researchers made adjustments for that during sample prep before sequencing, and alignment after sequencing.
It does seem like the state of the art differs from popular understanding. Not only is mitochondrial DNA straight forward (although not especially useful for forensics as it is maternal), but with specialized extraction it is still possible to recover nuclear DNA, just exceedingly painful to do so.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978032399...
> We also discovered an extra-pair-paternity event in Beethoven’s paternal line
I’m not a Beethoven scholar. Is this a novel discovery?
No idea! But I found this part of the paper confusing: "between the conception of Aert van Beethoven’s son Hendrik in Kampenhout, Belgium, in c.1572, and the conception of Ludwig van Beethoven seven generations later in 1770, in Bonn, Germany". I think that means that there were 8 generations from Aert to the famous composer, so Aert was the great...grandfather with 6 greats. (How many people know their family history that far back?)
The Wikipedia article for the composer's grandfather (who was also called Ludwig) says: in 1712 two boys named Ludwig van Beethoven were born. The two families were distantly related. [...] it is not certain "which Ludwig" actually settled in Bonn in 1733
But presumably both of those boys were officially descended from Aert so it doesn't matter for the purposes of this analysis.
> How many people know their family history that far back?
That is not so uncommon in Europe. Both from my maternal and paternal line the oldest ancestors I am aware of lived almost 400 years ago, in the mid 17th century. Before that the registers from my region are very patchy, because of the devastations of the Thirty Years' War. Were this is not the case, it is not uncommon that one is able to continue the line back to the 16th century, especially for people living in towns (not to speak of the aristocracy).
Or, as another example, here is photo of the reunion of the "descendants and sides relatives of Dr. Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora" (not related to myself): https://www.lutheriden.de/the-lutheriden.html
> How many people know their family history that far back?
Very common to be able to do this in Europe. I've traced my family back to the early 1500s via Ancestry.com, and my family tree isn't anything special. Before that period, records get very sparse among the common folk, though, and you pretty much need to have a strong connection with nobility to go further back in time.
The article says:
> One Beethoven biographer63 has previously suggested, on circumstantial grounds, that Ludwig senior may not have been Johann van Beethoven’s biological father
> 63 Canisius, C. Beethoven “Sehnsucht und Unruhe in der Musik”: Aspekte zu Leben und Werk Originalausgabe. Schott, 1992
So it's been hypothesized but presumably not demonstrated genetically.