Julien d’Huy

Julien d’Huy is a historian and mythologist affiliated with the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS / Collège de France / EHESS / EPHE). A specialist in comparative mythology, he focuses his work on applying phylogenetic methods to the study of myths, an approach he refers to as phylomythology.

His research aims to reconstruct the evolutionary history of mythological narratives by borrowing tools for constructing phylogenetic trees from evolutionary biology, thereby identifying common ancestors of myths originating from distinct and geographically distant cultural traditions. This method integrates mythological, archaeological, artistic, and linguistic data.

He is notably the author of Cosmogonies : la Préhistoire des mythes [Cosmogonies: The Prehistory of Myths] (La Découverte, 2020), L'Aube des mythes : quand les premiers Sapiens parlaient de l’Au-delà [The Dawn of Myths: When the First Sapiens Spoke of the Afterlife] (La Découverte, 2023), and Dragon : généalogie mondiale d'un mythe [Dragon: A Global Genealogy of a Myth] (Armand Colin, 2025), which draws on more than a decade of research on dragon figures around the world.