between the stories.[19] His analysis would produce an unexpected
conclusion: based on the phylogenetic tree, it seemed that ‘The Wolf
and the Kids’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ had come first. Contrary to
common belief, ‘The Tiger Grandmother’ was apparently a blend of
existing tales, rather than being the original version from which
others evolved.
Evolutionary thinking has a long history in the study of language
and culture. Decades before Darwin drew his tree of life, linguist
William Jones had been interested in how languages emerge, a field
known as ‘philology’. In 1786, Jones noted the similarities between
Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin: ‘no philologer could examine them all
three, without believing them to have sprung from some common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’[20] In evolutionary terms,
he was suggesting that these languages had evolved from a single
common ancestor. Jones’s ideas would later influence many other
scholars, including the Brothers Grimm, who were keen linguists. As
well as collecting together different variants of folktales, they tried to
study how the use of language had changed over time.[21]
Modern phylogenetic methods make it possible to analyse the
evolution of such stories in much more detail. After studying ‘Little
Red Riding Hood’, Jamie Tehrani worked with Sara Graça da Silva at
the University of Lisbon to examine a much wider range of stories,
tracing the evolution of 275 folktales in total. The pair found that
some tales have a long history; stories such as ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and
‘Beauty and the Beast’ may have originally emerged over 4,000
years ago. This would mean they are as old as the Indo-European
languages through which they spread. Although many folktales
eventually travelled widely, da Silva and Tehrani also found traces of
local rivalry in storytelling. ‘Spatial proximity appears to have had a
negative effect on the tales’ distributions,’ they noted, ‘suggesting
that societies were more likely to reject than adopt these stories from
their neighbours.’[22]
Folktales are often tied to a country’s identity, even if their origins
are not. When the Brothers Grimm compiled their collection of
traditional ‘German’ stories, they noticed that there were similarities