The hunt written in the northern sky

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.

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.

• 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

No prediction registered yet.