Stemmatics: reconstructing transmission trees from shared error

A mistake, once copied, becomes a fingerprint: every later copy made from the flawed one inherits it, so tracing which manuscripts share which mistakes can reconstruct who copied from whom. This page gathers conjectures that borrow that logic -- called stemmatics, the philologist's family-tree method, and a close cousin of how biologists build an evolutionary tree from shared mutations -- and point it at things that are not manuscripts at all: the tooth-count on a gear, the seams in how a map was drawn, small variant details on duplicate inscriptions, even the order in which a writer quoted earlier sources.

Horoscope stemmatics and Peutinger's seams both hunt for a genealogical seam -- a point where a calculation or a map's construction visibly switched from one source to another partway through. Dice bias lineages applies the same shared-error logic to something not usually treated as a text at all: whether biased dice found in different places share a manufacturing lineage. The Organon travels as a block treats the surviving copies of Aristotle's logical works as travelling together as a single genealogical block rather than independently, the way a stemma -- a reconstructed family tree of copies -- would predict if they were always copied as a set.