You have the burden of proof the wrong way around. The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the

You have the burden of proof the wrong way around. The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the Victorian Era, but was later. Cook was not a historian, but a sports writer and art critic. The book was _Spirals in Nature and Art_. And this hypothesis is a half-paragraph aside, with words like "would" and "probable", given with zero supporting evidence, and clearly one (as xe wrote "I think") that Cook originated. The burden of proof is to prove that that is true, not to blithely assume that it is true and demand that there be evidence to prove it false. Especially since Theodore Andrea Cook held that "right-handed spirals are more common in staircases". By "right-handed spiral", Cook actually meant anti-clockwise staircases (as can be seen from figure 29 in the book). Not even Cook believed the premise that has given rise to this 120-year-old myth. Cook wrote that anti-clockwise staircases were "more common" despite the fact that clockwise ones would have been better for this reason, a reason that xe invented from whole cloth without any support from how helical staircases even featured in any siege of any castle in history. 120 years of uncritical out of context repetition and augmentation later, here we are; with people demanding that the burden of proof lies with those who challenge something that was never proven in the first place, not expertly held, and not even held true by its own originator.