According to Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham
University, we can think of culture as information that mutates as it
gets transmitted from person-to-person and generation-to-
generation. If we want to understand the spread and evolution of
culture, folk stories are therefore useful because they are the product
of their society. ‘By definition, folktales don’t have a single
authoritative version,’ said Tehrani. ‘They are stories that belong to
everybody in the community. They have this organic quality.’[18]
Tehrani’s work on folktales started with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. If
you live in Western Europe, you’re probably familiar with the tale as
told by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century: a girl visits her
grandmother’s house, only to be met by a wolf in disguise. However,
this isn’t the only version of the story. There are several other folk
tales out there that bear similarities to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. In
Eastern Europe and the Middle East, people tell the story of ‘The
Wolf and the Kids’: a disguised wolf tricks a group of baby goats into
letting him into their house. In East Asia, there is the tale of ‘The
Tiger Grandmother’, in which a group of children encounter a tiger
that pretends to be their elderly relative.
The tale has spread across the world, but it’s difficult to tell in
which direction. A common theory among historians is that the East
Asian version was the original, with the European and Middle
Eastern stories coming later. But did ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and
‘The Wolf and the Kids’ really evolve from ‘The Tiger Grandmother’?
Folktales have historically been spoken rather than written down,
which means historical records are shallow and patchy. It’s often not
clear exactly when and where a particular story originated.
This is where phylogenetic approaches can come in useful. To
investigate the evolution of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and its variants,
Tehrani gathered together almost sixty different versions of the story,
spanning multiple continents. In place of a genetic sequence, he
summarised each story based on a set of seventy-two plot features,
such as the type of lead character, the trick used to deceive them,
and how the story ended. He then estimated how these features
evolved, resulting in a phylo genetic tree that mapped the relationship