Genealogy Survives Copying

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)

The Mixtec screenfold codices are unusual among surviving pre-contact American books: several of them narrate overlapping dynastic genealogies, giving the only measurable case of the same content transmitted through parallel manuscript lines in the pre-print Americas. Treating the shared genealogical spans across cognate codices as a natural transmission experiment yields a per-copy divergence rate for pictographic bookkeeping — the same stemmatic move philology makes with Greek manuscripts, executed on painted deerskin. The mechanism is political: dynastic legitimacy required cross-checkable pedigrees, so lineages were recopied and redrawn for different courts, creating parallel descent from common exemplars. If the conjecture holds, we obtain a quantified copying-fidelity constant for pre-contact American book transmission, which then calibrates how much drift separates any surviving codex from its destroyed exemplars — turning 'colonial shadows preserve lost originals' from a hope into a rated instrument.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Align the overlapping dynastic sequences across the cognate Mixtec codices in the facsimile corpus, scoring agreement on person-identity (calendrical name plus depicted attributes) and sequence order. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): agreement across cognate spans exceeds 80 percent. Secondary clause: disagreements accumulate monotonically with genealogical distance from the shared trunk (significant positive trend, p < 0.05), the signature of copy-chain drift rather than independent invention.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

FAMSI codex facsimile corpus: the cognate Mixtec codex facsimiles supply the overlapping dynastic sequences for alignment.

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 in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Overlapping dynastic genealogies across cognate Mixtec codices and their stylistic groupings (M.E. Smith; Pohl) imply exactly the parallel-transmission situation invoked, but executing a stemmatic alignment to derive a quantified per-copy divergence/fidelity constant for pictographic bookkeeping is un-run. Small specialist field.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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