Fig. 1

Timeline of early tree- and network diagrams in linguistics (top) and biology (bottom). Schottel’s branching table of Germanic languages from 1663 is the earliest we could identify. The three following early diagrams in linguistics by Stiernhielm (1671) [7], Hickes (1689), [9], and Gallet (1800) [8] all contain reticulation, real trees only start with Ćelakovský and Schleicher (1853) [4, 15]. The situation is similar in biology, where the two schemas by Leclerc De Buffon (1755) [12] and Rühling (1774) [13] allow for reticulation, in contrast to Lamarck (1809) [17] and Darwin (1837, 1859) [5, 16]