Un ours dans les étoiles, recherche phylogénétique sur un mythe préhistorique.

• Main Author: D'Huy, Julien
• Other Authors: Centre de Linguistique Anthropologique et Sociolinguistique - Institut Marcel Mauss (LIAS - IMM), École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: HAL CCSD 2012
• Subjects: Archeoastronomy; Folktale; Mythology; Evolution; Genetics; Cultural evolution; Horizontal transmission; Phylogenetics; Génétique; Mythologie; folklore; Archéoastronomie; Phylogénétique; Evolution culturelle; Transmission horizontale; anthro-se; lang; Arctic; The Handle; elk
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00825883/file/2012.4._Un_ours_dans_les_A_toiles_recherche_phylogA_nA_tique_sur_un_mythe_prA_historique._-_PrA_histoire_du_sud-ouest_20_1_91-106.pdf; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00825883

This paper gives new evidence that Upper Palaeolithic societies of western Europe would have interpreted stars as patterns or constellations. It also shows how we can scientifically reconstruct the prehistoric mythology. In Eurasia and North America, the stars in the handle of the Big Dipper are often interpreted as hunters and the Dipper itself as an elk or a bear, killed or pursued. This motif is not known on other continents, nor in the Arctic where the Big Dipper is seen better than everywhere else. The link between the Big Dipper and the Cosmic Hunt could only be explained by particular and very ancient historical links between the corresponding traditions. We postulate that the more two myths diverge, the more distant is their genetic relationship, geographically and temporally. We construct a database including the typological variations of the Big Dipper / Cosmic Hunt versions, where the mythological structural features were coded for their presence (1) or absence (0) in each of the target myths. They were selected to provide broad typological coverage, reflecting the known mythological variations of the myth. The whole data matrix contained 44 binary features coded for 18 Amerindian, Asian and European myths. Then we have treated the feature of the studied stories as character traits distributed among taxonomic units (myths). Indeed, there are many analogies between the ways that genes and myths evolved: e.g. both are system of replicators comprising discrete, heritable and highly conservative units (genes and mythemes); they are naturally or socially selected and generally vertically transmitted they evolve by a system of descent with modification they split into new versions and sometimes go extinct. These connections give hope that the use of phylogenetic methods will succeed and that historical signal can be found. First, the binary-coded mythological feature were computed thanks to a phylogenetic distances algorithm: Bio Neighbor Joining (tree 1), implemented in SplitsTree4, to find the optimal ...