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The hunt written in the northern sky
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Across Eurasia and the Americas the same story attaches to the stars of Ursa Major: a great animal is pursued by hunters, wounded, and its blood or the seasons turn with the chase. Julien d'Huy, working from Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore, built phylogenies of this 'Cosmic Hunt' and argued its distribution is consistent with a Pleistocene inheritance carried into the New World with its first peopling, rather than dozens of independent inventions or recent borrowing. The claim is exactly the kind of deep-memory story this lane refuses to take on faith and instead makes countable. If the Cosmic Hunt is an inherited motif tracking a peopling route, its pattern of presence and absence across traditions should be spatially and phylogenetically structured - shared far more between historically connected peoples than chance allows - and structured MORE strongly than an ordinary motif of the same global frequency. If it is not, deep inheritance cannot be distinguished from diffusion or convergent invention, and the 'oldest surviving story' loses its evidentiary basis. The missing knowledge is the age of the tale; its inheritance signal is decidable from the geometry of its distribution in a real motif database.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: for the Cosmic Hunt motif as coded in Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue, a Mantel test of shared-presence against a combined geographic-and-linguistic distance (with a peopling-route path metric) will exceed the correlation obtained for at least 95 percent of frequency-matched null motifs drawn from the same catalogue (primary clause: the motif's distance-structuring beats the 95th percentile of frequency-matched nulls). Disambiguation: nulls are motifs whose global attestation count is within +/-20 percent of the Cosmic Hunt's, so frequency cannot explain the signal. Coverage guard: if the Cosmic Hunt is attested in fewer than 20 traditions in the catalogue the test voids for insufficient support rather than resolving toward independent invention.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore (the published/online motif-by-area database) plus d'Huy's coded Cosmic Hunt distribution - extract the motif's presence/absence vector, compute a Mantel correlation against geographic-linguistic distance, and compare it to a frequency-matched null ensemble of other motifs from the same catalogue.
Browse the registry: D-PLACE / Seshat →
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Global / method; Deep prehistory Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 30000 BCE – 13000 BCE Claimed Pleistocene origin of the Cosmic Hunt motif predating and tracking the first peopling of the Americas (conventionally c.13,000-23,000+ years ago). Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Memory, tradition & embodied knowledge; Time, sky & calendars a star myth carried across continents by oral transmission; star lore of Ursa Major Tagged by claude-fable-5-1 (driver, lane 1da5; requested max effort, runtime not independently attested)
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- The oral-formulaic page is about composition in performance, not the distribution of a myth motif. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim The object is whether a motif was inherited along a peopling route rather than independently invented, which the rubric places at the record tier as oral transmission and its fidelity. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Assigned
- Dialect geography: isoglosses, distance-decay, and seriation The apparatus is a Mantel test of shared presence against geographic and linguistic distance with a peopling-route path metric, a distance-decay reading of a feature's spatial pattern. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- D-PLACE / Seshat Kill test loads Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue motif-by-area database, a cross-cultural comparative dataset, with d'Huy's coded Cosmic Hunt distribution. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, deep-prehistory wave against real published prehistoric corpora (von Petzinger's Upper-Palaeolithic geometric-sign database; the Bacon et al. 2023 CAJ phenological-notation dataset and its rebuttals; the Marshack vs d'Errico notation re-readings; Snow's hand-stencil digit-ratio tables; the Gargas/Cosquer incomplete-hand catalogues; Blombos/Diepkloof engraved-object inventories; the Reznikoff/Fazenda cave-acoustic surveys; the Geissenkloesterle/Hohle Fels/Isturitz flute corpus and the Divje Babe controversy; Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue and d'Huy's motif phylogenies; Nunn & Reid's 21 drowned-coastline traditions; Mazama/Budj Bim geochronology; Thom's megalithic-yard corpus and Kendall/Freeman reanalyses; Winn's Vinca sign inventory; the Ishango/Lebombo/Border Cave notched bones; the Aubert/Brumm U-series rock-art dataset). Discipline: every kill names a real corpus/database/dataset and a countable, decidable operation (discovery-curve saturation, permutation/ceiling tests, mark-count instability census, misclassification-corrected CIs, configuration-combinatorics, engraved-fraction, geometry-controlled acoustic permutation, survivorship distribution, distribution-geometric motif tests, bathymetric/tephrochronological consistency, Bayesian quantum reanalysis, repertoire-size thresholds, sampling-vs-origin correlation), thresholds far from 1, disambiguation pinned in the prediction, and explicit coverage guards separating taphonomy from ancient absence. Famous controversies (lunar notation, proto-writing, flute-or-bone) enter as decipherment-instability data, not as settled stories. Sound items stay strictly pre-notational (Palaeolithic aerophones and cave resonance) and disjoint from the concurrent ancient-notated-music wave (Hurrian/Greek/Mesopotamian tuning texts) and from the Asian music-scores wave (medieval/early-modern East/South/Southeast-Asian tablatures). Drops: Goebekli Tepe symbol-recurrence and Jiahu incised marks (held back to avoid a third proto-sign repertoire-threshold item; documented in the report as runnable alternates).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
d'Huy's Cosmic Hunt work is published and already statistical: he built phylogenetic networks of the motif from Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue and used Mantel tests to argue its distribution tracks geography/peopling and supports a Palaeolithic diffusion (d'Huy 2013; Le Quellec, Thuillard, d'Huy & Berezkin 2018). But the conjecture's specific discriminator is a comparison against a frequency-matched null ensemble - does the Cosmic Hunt's distance-structuring beat 95% of catalogue motifs of the same attestation count? That frequency-controlled benchmark, which is what separates genuine structuring from any-motif-of-that-frequency, was not located as run; d'Huy demonstrates structure, not the frequency-matched contrast.
Sources cited by the triage
- J. d'Huy, 'A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber sky: a phylogenetic reconstruction of Palaeolithic mythology,' Les Cahiers de l'AARS 15 (2013)
- Y.E. Berezkin, The Analytical Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore (motif-by-area database)
- J.-L. Le Quellec, M. Thuillard, J. d'Huy & Y.E. Berezkin, 'A Large-Scale Study of World Myths,' Trames 22(4) (2018): 407-424 - Mantel-based analysis of motif distributions
Predictions
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