d'Huy — Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Myth Families (Cosmic Hunt, Polyphemus)

The central methodological corpus for tree-based (cladistic/Bayesian) analysis of myth. d'Huy codes versions of a myth family (e.g. the Cosmic Hunt — a pursued animal becomes a constellation; or Polyphemus — a blinded master-of-animals) as presence/absence vectors of discrete narrative traits ("mythemes"), then applies the phylogenetic software developed for biology and historical linguistics to recover a tree of versions, a most-recent-common-ancestor reconstruction, and a root location. Tehrani's Little Red Riding Hood study (PLOS ONE 2013) is the most widely cited demonstration that the approach can correctly separate related tale families (ATU 333 vs. ATU 123) and detect borrowing between them. This is the strongest existing formal machinery for arguing descent in mythology — the analogue of the comparative method's sound laws — and therefore the key method source for the vault's Q1.