1 · Cultural Evolution & Transmission Studies. Boyd & Richerson (Culture and the Evolutionary Process, 1985) and Henrich (The Secret of Our Success, 2015) model cultural traits as transmissible units subject to drift, selection, and mutation. Transmission is networked, not strictly linear; generation intervals appear implicitly via demographic assumptions. Overlap: theoretical grounding for why traditions persist or decay. Divergence: these models rarely operationalise deep-time parent layers with explicit thresholds, and do not integrate custodial evidence from living traditions.

2 · Archaeological Chronology & Bayesian Modelling. Tools such as OxCal and BCal provide rigorous dating uncertainties and formal reproducibility through Bayesian age–depth models, Monte Carlo simulation, and sensitivity analysis for radiocarbon and OSL. Overlap: underpins every dating claim in the Ledger. Divergence: does not typically operationalise inheritance chains or evidence cascades.

3 · Phylogenetic Methods in Cultural Evolution. Researchers apply evolutionary-biology methods to cultural artefacts and languages, estimating branching patterns and ancestral states. Tehrani’s phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood (2013) is an accessible worked example. Overlap: formalises continuity vs divergence statistically. Divergence: requires trait characterisation and codings not always available for deep time; horizontal transfer complicates tree-like inference.

4 · Oral Tradition Studies. Indigenous studies and ethnographic work on custodial knowledge systems addresses long-range transmission of narratives and practices. Some oral histories preserve evidence of environmental events (volcanic eruptions, coastline changes) over millennia. Overlap: directly informs the custodial channel. Divergence: methods are typically qualitative and interpretive; the tension between Western evidential standards and community-controlled knowledge systems is substantive and unresolved. This protocol does not claim to resolve it — it attempts to hold both channels without collapsing one into the other.

5 · Deep-Time Symbolic Production Research. Site-centric research on earliest symbolic behaviour (Sulawesi cave art, Blombos engravings, Swabian Jura figurines, Bizmoune beads) produces high-quality dating chronologies and contributes to debates about behavioural modernity. Overlap: provides the primary evidence base for Ledger entries. Divergence: does not quantify continuity chains in terms of fixed parent layers; remains site-centric rather than protocol-driven.

6 · Computational Models of Culture. Agent-based models and network models of innovation diffusion in computational social science begin to simulate cultural dynamics over generational scales. Overlap: could simulate parent-layer continuity distributions under varying assumptions. Divergence: few applications to timescales spanning deep Palaeolithic contexts. This is a natural extension point for the framework.

Archaeologists will respect the commitment to chronological transparency and formal error budgets. They will probe assumptions about continuity — particularly the inference from “artefacts survive” to “practice persists.” Stress-test action: ST-2 worked examples must make the Material→Practice inference explicit and auditable for each site.

Cultural evolutionists will appreciate the formalisation but challenge the linear chain metaphor. Real transmission is networked, not a single-file queue of parents. Stress-test action: clarify that N measures depth (minimum path length), not topology. The pedigree-collapse caveat (GF-2) already addresses this, but a worked comparison with branching-transmission models would strengthen the case.

Ethnographers and Indigenous-studies scholars will engage with the custodial channel but challenge the quantification of oral-history depth. Scoring custodial knowledge on a three-value scale risks flattening it. Stress-test action: document cases where the scoring protocol distorts or underrepresents custodial evidence. GF-4 (epistemic asymmetry) is the standing flag; specific failure cases are needed.

Quantitative modellers will likely want to build agent-based versions of the protocol — simulating how traditions with different transmission topologies, population sizes, and disruption rates cross or fail to cross the N > 40 threshold. Stress-test action: welcome this as an extension. The protocol defines the scoring; simulation would test whether the threshold is well-calibrated.

Council meta-lesson (v0.3): Review cycles need termination conditions. Schema-first, tooling-later. One worked example beats three revision cycles. Linter deferred until scaling requires it.