The fossil colophon is a stopwatch on the treadmill

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Palm-leaf manuscripts in most of South Asia decayed within a few centuries, so every old text we have is the survivor of repeated recopying — but the interval of that treadmill has only ever been guessed at, never measured. Scribes, however, sometimes copied their exemplar's closing colophon along with the text before adding their own, leaving manuscripts that carry two dates: the copy's and its parent's. Each such fossil colophon is a direct measurement of one recopying interval, a datum no survival model of the subcontinent currently possesses. If these date-pairs exist in catalogued numbers, the half-life of the South Asian manuscript — the central unknown of the whole field — becomes an empirical distribution rather than a plausibility argument.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among dated manuscripts in the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue, at least 1 in 200 will contain a second, inherited date demonstrably belonging to an exemplar rather than to the copy itself (wrong era for the hand, or an impossible pairing with the scribe's own date), and the distribution of parent-to-copy gaps will have a median between 100 and 300 years. Primary clause: the median inherited-date gap falls between 100 and 300 years; the 1-in-200 frequency clause is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue colophon transcriptions: extract all manuscripts recording more than one date, classify inherited versus own dates, and compute the gap distribution; supplement with double-dated items recorded in the Cambridge Sanskrit Manuscripts Project catalogue.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The palm-leaf recopying interval / manuscript 'half-life' is routinely stated as a guess (~300-350 years), and colophon dating is standard, but using inherited (copied-exemplar) dates as direct interval measurements is an un-run operationalization. Thin, poorly-digitized field (NGMCP colophon transcriptions), so absence of a prior formulation is not novelty.

'Palm leaf manuscript' (Wikipedia) — lifespan ~few decades to ~600 yrs; recopying necessitated
Ajotikar & Ajotikar, 'Colophons in Sanskrit manuscripts' (IIT-KGP SCLWS)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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