  Cultural phylogenies, or "trees" of culture, are typically built using
methods from biology that use similarities and differences in artifacts to
infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them.
While these methods have yielded important insights, particularly in
linguistics, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural
phylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal
transmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic
reconstruction using dynamic community detection that explicitly accounts for
transmission between lineages. We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative
relationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural
phylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that,
although the phylogeny is fundamentally tree-like, horizontal transmission is
common and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In
addition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased
between 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R
package called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other
cultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological
systems where high resolution reproductive data is available, to assess how
levels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.
