Studying folktale diffusion needs unbiased dataset

Bortolini et al. (1) claim to infer patterns of folktale diffusion using genomic data. What is not said in their paper is that such a proposal is not new. For example, Korotayev and Khaltourina (2) showed statistical correlation between spatial distributions of mythological motifs and genetic markers, considerably above the 4,000 km proposed by Bortolini et al. (1). Such correlations allow us to reconstruct in detail the … [↵][1]1To whom...