Search Here

Fairy tales have been around for many years. While its traces go back to prehistoric times, thousands of years ago, one particular tale has been found to go farther back into bronze age, reports The Guardian.

Methods used for this discovery are practiced by the biologists, a team of researchers examined common connections in 275 Indo-European fairy tales from all across the globe and revealed that the some of them may have roots that are thought to be much older than it was earlier discovered, "long before the emergence of the literary record."

The famous stories like Beauty and Beast and Rumplestiltskin may have been written in the 17^th and the 18^th century, the researchers believed that these stories were at least 4,000 years old. According to their analysis, Jack and the Beanstalk was found in a collection of stories titled, The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure, and actually dates back to over 5,000 years ago. Another folk tale, The Smith and the Devil, is estimated to be at least 6,000 years and belongs to the bronze age. Durham University anthropologist Jamie Tehrani and Sara Graca Da Silva, folklorist from New University of Lisbon, worked together on this research and believe that the study shows a lot about our shared cultural heritage. The study is published in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

Dr Tehrani explained: "We used a toolkit that we borrowed from evolutionary biology called phylogenetic comparative methods. This enables you to reconstruct the past in the absence of physical evidence.

"We've excavated information about our story-telling history, using information that's been preserved through the mechanism of inheritance, so in that sense they embody their own history.

"By comparing the folk tales that we find in different cultures and knowing something about the historical relationships among those cultures, we can make inferences about the stories that would have been told by their common ancestors," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.