posted on 2013-11-13, 03:36authored byJamshid J. Tehrani
To test whether key similarities between the East Asian tales and ATU 123 and ATU 333 are ancestral, the presence/absence of each trait in the hypothesised last common ancestor (LCA) of ATU 123 and ATU 333 was reconstructed under parsimony and Bayesian inference. The cells in the Parsimony column show that the traits were absent in the LCA of ATU 333 and ATU 123 in all of the most parsimonious trees (MPTs) returned by a cladistic analysis. The cells in the Bayesian column show the mean probability of each trait being present in the LCA of ATU 333 and ATU 123 across the Bayesian distribution of trees. The variance in the mean values for all traits was less than 0.1. See Methods section for details of both analyses.