Professor Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist who led the team, said the central whorl of the fingerprint was a common pattern in the Middle East.



"Around 60 per cent of the Middle Eastern population have the same structure," he said.



The revelation will give weight to the increasingly popular academic theory that Da Vinci's mother, Caterina, was a slave who came to Tuscany from Istanbul.



Alessandro Vezzosi, an expert on the Renaissance genius and the director of the museum in his hometown of Vinci, said: "We have documents that suggest she was Oriental, at least from the Mediterranean area.