[{"id":36,"title":"Phylogenetic tools and myths: reconstructing human prehistory.","sha":"35716e31f2a25585ead99b321040b984","user_id":116,"state":"published","body":"Similar myths with a sufficiently complex set of traits that could not be the product of many independent inventions can be found around the world. Moreover, certain myths evolve very slowly and their emergence probably date back to the Palaeolithic age. These myths may also spread together with the first human migrations. They carry an unequivocal phylogenetic message and computational methods derived from evolutionary biology have been used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and protoforms for some of them (e.g. d'Huy 2012a-d, 2013a-j).  \r\nWe can construct a binary data matrix where the rows correspond to the various cultural areas being analyzed and the columns correspond to different types of complex oral tales that are present in each area. There are numerous  extensive motif and tale-type indices to help us in this task, at the local or global level. An effort should be made to exclude recent borrowings. We can then apply phylogenetic methods to extract a signal that could be converted into trees (e.g. Neighbor joining, maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood or Bayesian analysis),  networks (e.g. Neighbor-net) or clusters. Among other things, this could serve to assess to what extent mythological and genetic histories are congruent, to test hypothesis about human prehistory (e.g. to reconstruct the early human migrations) or to understand what drives mythological diversification and disparity.\r\n\r\n--- https://unive-paris1.academia.edu/JuliendHuy/Phylogenetics-of-Myths-and-Folktales\r\n--- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julien_DHuy/contributions","created_at":"2015-02-14T10:19:36.199Z","updated_at":"2023-07-04T22:34:49.872Z","zenodo_id":22226,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15118","subject":null,"tags":["phylogenetics","mythology","prehistory","oral_tradition","early_human_migrations","memetics"],"vote_count":24,"view_count":1,"score":24.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":false,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null},{"id":224,"title":"Mythology and ancient origins of the domestic dog","sha":"c3acf0035ed23d8e82c1ea53e18c8f14","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"The [use of appropriate statistical techniques applied to myths and folktales] (https://unive-paris1.academia.edu/JuliendHuy/Phylogenetics-of-Myths-and-Folktales) concerning domestic animals may provide valuable informations as to their origin and past diffusion. Indeed, the domestication of animals have probably been accompanied by the creation of many myths, which have followed the diffusion of species. \r\nLet's take an example. Using [Berezkin's database] (http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin/), I created absence and presence database for 23 myths that only concern dogs and 22 geographical areas (with more than 5 myths identified for each of them). I then built a  neighbour joining tree based on Jaccard distances with [Splitstree4] (http://www.splitstree.org/) (see attached). According to genetic analysis about the origin of dogs (e.g. [Ding et al. 2012] (http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v108/n5/pdf/hdy2011114a.pdf)), I rooted the tree in Indonesia. The results show a global correlation between phylogenetic and geographical clustering. In agreement with previous results ([van Asch et al. 2013] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1766/20131142)), it also suggests two waves of settlement in America. Moreover, using the tree, it becomes possible to reconstruct the palaeolithic mythology around the dog, i.e., « A man and a dog in the moon » (A32C in the Berezkin's database), « Talking dog » (B41), « People descend from a dog » (C12B), « Puppy as a reward » (E9E), « Chthonic canine »  (I27) and « Woman and dog » (K47A), some of those stories being already dated to the Stone age through other methods (eg I27: [Berezkin 2005] (http://www.ehrc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ehrc/PDF%20Berezkin.pdf) ; C12B and K47A : [d'Huy 2013] (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/932254/filename/2013.11._Des_mythes_prA_historiques_ont-ils_pu_survivre_au_dA_peuplement_du_Sahara._Le_cas_des_hommes-chiens.A_-_Les_Cahiers_de_l_AARS_16_107-112.pdf))","created_at":"2015-09-16T13:41:48.649Z","updated_at":"2015-09-22T17:11:05.688Z","zenodo_id":61201,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.31043","subject":null,"tags":["dog","phylogenetics","mythology","origins of the domestic dog","memetics","palaeolithic","stone age","migration","oral tradition","folktale","early human migrations"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":false,"attachment_file_name":"Dog.png","attachment_content_type":"image/png","attachment_file_size":39034,"attachment_updated_at":"2015-09-16T13:41:47.854Z"},{"id":234,"title":"How to Build a Global Tree of All Known Languages? - A Brief Demonstration.","sha":"138279e18ac6c0cb44da84e51e1b37df","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"[I] (https://unive-paris1.academia.edu/JuliendHuy) used the [Dedius’s binary coding (with MrBayes)] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/suppl/2010/08/27/rspb.2010.1595.DC1/rspb20101595supp1.pdf) of the [WALS dataset] (http://wals.info/), the softwares [Structure 2.3.4]  (http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/structure.html) (fig.1, see supplementary material), and [StructureHarvester] (http://taylor0.biology.ucla.edu/structureHarvester/) (fig.2) to estimate the most likelihood number (“K”) of founding populations (here, K = 20) needed to explain the structure of the corpus. For each cultural area, the Fst score oscillates between 42–88%, [which is much higher than the genetic variation among human populations] (http://www.pnas.org/content/106/42/17671.short), and suggests that the language families, once established, seem to have been very conservative.  Then I excluded from the corpus each language with more than 30% data which refer to acculturation signal (i.e. less than 70% of single-origin). Indeed, these languages having a complex history, it is expected that they are intermediate between many others and “blur” the phylogenetic signal. Using the altered corpus, I created many trees and networks (fig.3-5), which correctly group, for the first time, all languages into known language families and show evidence for some higher level clusters. The Austronesian language family may not form a monophyletic group.   \r\nThis idea, which has yet to be tested in larger datasets, may be a major step toward a complete understanding of the historical relationship between the world's languages and many other important questions, such as the reconstruction of the human proto-language's structure and its evolution. ","created_at":"2015-09-21T22:04:44.258Z","updated_at":"2016-05-14T05:22:13.934Z","zenodo_id":62024,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.31290","subject":null,"tags":["phylogenetics","language","structure","global tree of all known languages","prehistory","proto-language","comparative method","cultural fst","cultural evolution","linguistic evolution","networks","linguistics","evolutionary anthropology","origin of language","mother tongue","first language","journal of brief ideas"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":"Electronic_supplementary_material.pdf","attachment_content_type":"application/pdf","attachment_file_size":292814,"attachment_updated_at":"2015-09-21T22:04:41.148Z"}]