Airport51Darwin
Airport51 Inc · Origin of Pieces
Darwin
Trace where digital content first appeared and how it evolved.
Free. No account required. Evidence, not a truth verdict.
Searches public archives for the earliest known appearance and independent crawl witnesses. Language: earliest known public witness — never “original source found.”
Text-only analysis can locate matching occurrences and stylistic signals. It cannot declare a definitive origin URL. Language: earliest matching occurrence located — never “original source found.”
File-level provenance (hash, metadata, embedded credentials) is coming soon. Upload analysis is not available in this free Origin Check yet.
Image provenance (online occurrences, Content Credentials / C2PA when present) is coming soon. Absence of credentials is not proof of synthesis.
— a real 2014 essay with inspectable witnesses.
The pipeline
How Darwin reads a work
Evidence before scores. Archive and crawl witnesses first; model-derived signals only as secondary context. No single signal decides the reading.
Public witnesses
Live lookups against the Internet Archive and Common Crawl for the earliest known public appearance and independent corroboration. Earliest known is not original creation.
Timeline & ledger
An evidence timeline and witness ledger show each observation with timestamp kind, independence, and limitations — inspectable, not a black-box score.
Limitations
Every report states what was observed, inferred, conflicted, and not established. Provenance is not truth; public existence is not authorship proof.
Advanced signals
Publication-era priors and stylistic heuristics appear only after the evidence trail, labeled contextual and weak — never as proof of authorship.
Fig. 1 · contextual baseline (advanced signals)
The Human-Origin Prior Curve
The truth boundary. Darwin establishes existence, observed time, and integrity evidence. Whether a work’s claims are factually true sits outside that boundary.
Existence
The piece appeared somewhere public, and Darwin can point to where it was observed.
Timestamp
When it appeared or was captured, corroborated across independent witnesses rather than a single source.
Integrity
Whether the observed record has stayed consistent across the capture span since it was first sighted.
Truth
Whether the work’s claims are factually correct. A page can exist, be old, and be unchanged, and still be wrong. Darwin does not rule on this.
The full report
The Beagle Log
Every voyage kept a log. The Beagle Log is Darwin’s full, dated, reproducible record of a work’s origin, and of everything that has drifted toward it since.
- Preserve: signed Darwin capture, WARC/WACZ, hashes, and independent verification.
- Investigate: deeper similarity, Origin Family Tree, and version diffs.
- Monitor: alerts when new witnesses or lookalikes appear.
- Document: professional evidence dossier as PDF/JSON/WACZ.
- Integrate: API, batch jobs, and team workflow.
Be aboard for the first voyage.
Leave your email for launch access. The free Origin Check above stays complete — paid value is depth, preservation, and scale.
No spam. One email when the Log opens.
Methodology note
What the evidence means, and what it does not
Origin of Pieces verifies provenance, not absolute truth. It shows what was observed, when it was observed, where it was observed, and how strongly independent witnesses support the evidence chain. The free Origin Check is a preliminary reading based on visible timestamp and provenance signals plus on-device text heuristics. It is not a statement that content is “human-made” and not a legal conclusion.
Darwin never treats a single archive result as final. A finding is presented as corroborated by N independent witnesses, and one witness alone is flagged as not independently corroborated. AI-detection heuristics are weak witnesses only. Scores are reproducible computations, presented as evidence strength rather than authority. Input modes are not evidentially equal: URL, text, file, and image analysis carry different claims and confidence ceilings.
Darwin is an evidence-analysis instrument, not legal advice. Where data was not publicly retrievable it is reported as not established, never silently inferred.