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Phylogenetic Mythology

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Phylogenetic mythology treats myths the way evolutionary biologists treat species: as things that inherit traits from ancestors, mutate over time, and diverge as populations split apart. If two cultures’ flood myths (or hunt myths, or creation myths) share enough specific, non-obvious structural detail, the argument goes, that similarity is evidence of common descent from a single ancestral story — not just coincidence or independent invention.

Method

The technique borrows directly from cladistics and Bayesian phylogenetics — the same software used to build gene trees. A myth is broken down into “mythemes”: discrete, codeable narrative units (e.g. “a hunter pursues an animal,” “the animal is transformed into a constellation”). Presence or absence of each mytheme across hundreds of cultural variants is coded like a genetic character matrix, then run through tree-building algorithms to produce a hypothesis about how the variants are related, and — more speculatively — what the ancestral (“proto-”) version looked like.

Much of this work leans on Yuri Berezkin’s comparative folklore database, which catalogs motifs across roughly 900+ ethnic groups worldwide. Julien d’Huy, working in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris, is the researcher most associated with applying phylogenetic software directly to this kind of data.

Case studies

The Cosmic Hunt

A hunter or animal pursues another animal, which is transformed into a constellation (often identified with Ursa Major). Variants are attested from Siberia across the Bering region into North America. D’Huy’s 2013 study (“A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber sky”) used phylogenetic reconstruction to argue for a Paleolithic-era origin — i.e. old enough to have been carried across the land bridge into the Americas rather than diffused later by contact.

Seven Sisters (Pleiades)

A strikingly similar story — a group of sisters, often seven, pursued by a hunter (frequently identified with Orion) — turns up independently among groups as distant as Aboriginal Australians and ancient Greeks. Some astronomers and folklorists have floated a genuinely startling claim: that the story could be up to 100,000 years old, predating the out-of-Africa migration, based on how the Pleiades’ apparent star count has changed over millennia.

Contested

The ~100,000-year date is speculative, not consensus. At least one researcher quoted in coverage of this claim argues the cross-cultural similarity could be convergent coincidence — a natural story to tell about a distinctive star cluster — rather than evidence of shared deep ancestry.

Earth-Diver creation myth

A creature (bird, muskrat, etc.) dives to the bottom of a primordial ocean to bring up mud, from which land is made. Distributed from northern Eurasia into North America; Berezkin and d’Huy have argued for a Paleolithic-to-early-Holocene origin tied to the same population movements that populated the Americas.

Contested

Popular coverage sometimes ties this myth’s spread to specific ancient genomes (e.g. the Mal’ta individual). That genetic link is a more speculative layer on top of the myth-distribution argument itself, and shouldn’t be read as equally well-supported.

Flood myth

D’Huy’s own contribution here (published as an RMN Newsletter piece) is notably more modest in scale than the Cosmic Hunt or Earth-Diver work: he traces a shared flood-narrative ancestor to around 4,000 years ago among Indo-European populations, rather than claiming Paleolithic depth. Worth noting as a contrast — not every phylogenetic-mythology result reaches for the oldest possible date.

Reception and criticism

The core objection: biological inheritance is (mostly) vertical — genes pass from parent to offspring — while cultural transmission is heavily horizontal. Myths spread through contact, trade, conquest, and deliberate borrowing in ways genes simply don’t, and can also be independently reinvented by unrelated groups drawing on universal human experience (the night sky, predation, floods). Treating a myth’s spread as a clean phylogenetic tree risks smuggling in an assumption — common ancestry — that the method is supposed to be testing.

More specific critiques raised in the literature:

  • Origin-point instability: Bayesian reconstructions of where a given myth-tree’s “root” sits often don’t robustly support any one geographic origin, undercutting claims like “this myth started in Asia.”
  • Oral vs. literary bias: coding schemes built for stable literary texts may not handle the fluidity of oral tradition well.
  • Convergence vs. descent: structurally similar stories can arise from shared human psychology and environment (predators, night sky, storms) rather than a shared prehistoric ancestor.

The Finnish Method

The historic-geographic method — informally the “Finnish Method” — is the 19th/20th-century precursor to this whole project, developed by Julius Krohn and formalized by his son Kaarle Krohn, with Krohn’s student Antti Aarne extending it into the Aarne–Thompson tale-type index (1910). The method: gather every known variant of a folktale, plot literary attestations chronologically and oral collections geographically, strip each variant down to comparable elements, and use the resulting distribution pattern to infer a hypothetical original (“Urform”) and its path of diffusion.

The goal — reconstruct an archetype and trace its spread — is exactly d’Huy’s goal too. What changed is the tool: manual comparative philology, done by hand over decades, replaced by phylogenetic software borrowed from biology. Phylogenetic mythology is arguably less a break from the Finnish Method than a computational revival of it.

See also

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