Study of fairy story origins traces some back thousands of years, with one tale dating back as far as bronze age 
 
 Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed. 
 
 Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and “long before the emergence of the literary record”. 
 
 While stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin were first written down in the 17th and 18th century, the researchers found they originated “significantly earlier”. “Both tales can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2,500 and 6,000 years ago,” they write. 
 
 Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graça da Silva, from New University of Lisbon, believed the research – published in the Royal Society Open Science journal – has answered a question about our cultural heritage. 
 
 These stories have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed Dr Jamie Tehrani 
 
 In the 19th century Wilhelm Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm, believed many of the fairy stories they popularised were rooted in a shared cultural history dating back to the birth of the Indo-European language family. 
 
 But later thinkers challenged that view, saying some stories were much younger, and passed into oral tradition having first been written down by writers from the 16th and 17th centuries. 
 
 Da Silva told the Guardian that the origin of folk tales was one of the “biggest mysteries” in folk tale studies, with its reconstruction “often frustrated not only by difficulties in defining the genre but also as a result of the rich interplay between oral and written traditions”. The new method of mapping the stories through common languages and geographical proximity worked, “because in oral tradition, folk tales are transmitted through spoken language, so a correlation might be expected; and also because both languages and folk tales are transmitted from generation to generation.” 
 
 Tehrani said their study agreed with Grimm’s theory: “Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than classical mythology – some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts – but our findings suggest they are much older than that.” 
 
 Analysis showed Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when eastern and western Indo-European languages split – more than 5,000 years ago. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. A folk tale called The Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age. 
 
 Forgotten fairytales slay the Cinderella stereotype | Philip Oltermann Read more 
 
 The story, which involves a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the devil in order to gain supernatural ability, then tricking the evil power, is not so well known today, but its theme of a Faustian pact is familiar to many. 
 
 
 
 The study employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species, and used a tree of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales on it, to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time. 
 
 Tehrani said: “We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language.” 
 
 Da Silva believes the stories endure thanks to “the power of storytelling and magic from time immemorial”. 
 
 “Besides, the motifs present in fairytales are timeless and fairly universal, comprising dichotomies such as good and evil; right and wrong, punishment and reward, moral and immoral, male and female,” she added. “Ultimately, despite being often disregarded as fictitious, and even as a lesser form of narrative, folk tales are excellent case studies for cross-cultural comparisons and studies on human behaviour, including cooperation, decision making, [and so on].” 
 
 The author and academic Marina Warner, who has written a history of fairytales, called the paper “fascinating”. “What’s interesting to me is it shows how deeply this creative power of the imagination lies in the human being, how it’s about making sense of your world by inventing narratives that resist its difficulties,” she said. “In the case of The Smith and the Devil, it’s a cunning tale – the trickster tricked, showing a very ancient version of that defiance of difficulty. That capricious chance will play tricks on you, but you, with cunning, will be able to resist that. It’s a kind of joke the audience shares to feel a little better.” 
 
 Beauty and the Beast, or The Animal Bride, shows a similar kind of imagining, she added. “It’s making sense of our relationship with the natural world - eliminating the threat. A beast figure marries a woman, and then the stories take different turns; in one she kills him, in one she finds he turns into a man when she kisses him.” 
 
 Press Association contributed to this report. ||||| 
 
 Broadway’s Lilla Crawford stars as Little Red Riding Hood in the film version of “Into the Woods,” which is based largely on the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers. (Peter Mountain/Copyright 2014 Disney Enterprises, Inc.) 
 
 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm weren’t trying to get famous writing stories for kids. 
 
 The brothers were trained philologists, serious young men who grew up in poverty and wanted to make a name for themselves doing something important. They had a cause (German nationalism) and a mission: to uncover the origins of the German language. If they spent a lot of time reading fairy tales, it was because they believed those stories revealed something fundamental about German language and culture. They aimed to trace the evolution of their nation — which, in the mid-19th century, was still so fragmented and in flux it barely warranted the title — via stories about talking animals, clever children, evil stepmothers and tricksters of all sorts. 
 
 So they searched old book collections, chatted with friends, sought out some peasant mothers with a few good yarns up their sleeves. And they found something a lot bigger, and older, than the Germans. 
 
 According to Sara Graca da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani, authors of a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, many of the fairy tales we associate with the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Anderson and Disney are thousands of years older than the people who first stuck them in a book. Some of them are so old that they predate modern languages and religions — one is even older than writing itself. 
 
 Rather than being unique to certain cultures — “Snow White” as essentially German, for example — these stories evolved from a common ancestor, much the same way living things did. And in the same way biologists understand evolution by comparing animals’ DNA, da Silva and Tehrani say they can elucidate mysteries about the origins of cultures by looking at the stories they tell. 
 
 Not all of this is new. For more than a century, folklorists have been grouping tales from disparate parts of the world according to shared themes, many of which are charmingly (and perhaps disturbingly) specific — “The Obstinate Wife Learns to Obey” for example, or “The Lecherous Holy Man and the Maiden in a Box.” The Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) classification system, the standard of such groupings, includes more than 2,000 kinds of stories that can be applied to fables from all over the world. Clearly, the tales we use to tease, terrify and lull our kids to sleep share some common cultural DNA. 
 
 Indeed, the Brothers Grimm wouldn’t have been surprised by da Silva and Tehrani’s finding. Way back in 1884, Wilhelm Grimm asserted that people who spoke languages that shared Indo-European ancestry — the idea of an Indo-European language family had recently become mainstream — might also share folklore and that the contents of his “Children’s and Household Tales” weren’t simply German but also part of a much broader tradition. 
 
 Yet many folklorists dispute this notion. If disparate cultures share stories, they argue, it’s because they’ve been passed through societies by trade, conquest, migration and war. You can’t chart two tales back to a common ancestor because there’s too much cross-contamination. 
 
 “The consensus was that these processes would have destroyed any deep signatures of descent from ancient ancestral populations,” Tehrani explained to the Atlantic magazine. 
 
 And even if stories bear traces of their ancient origins, theories about their evolution are difficult to prove. Before the printing press, folk tales were transmitted only orally — no medieval monk was going to spend decades illuminating a manuscript about Rapunzel and her unwieldy hair. And however influential they might be, stories don’t leave much in the way of a fossil record. If “Little Red Riding Hood” existed several thousand years ago, the story didn’t leave any physical proof of its presence until someone thought to write it down. 
 
 Which is why da Silva and Tehrani approached the task of tracing stories like geneticists, rather than fossil hunters. If a researcher can figure out the relationships between species by scanning their DNA and pinpointing their last common ancestor, why can’t folklorists do the same? 
 
 According to Tehrani, an anthropologist at the University of Durham, in Britain, they can. 
 
 Folk tales “evolve through similar processes as biological species (variation, selection and inheritance),” he wrote for the Conversation in 2013. Mapping their evolutionary history can fill gaps in the literary record “by using information about the past that has been preserved through the mechanism of inheritance.” 
 
 In biology, such mapping is part of phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary history and relationships among organisms. Tehrani published his first phylogenetic analysis of a folk tale in PLOS One in 2013, using “Little Red Riding Hood.” 
 
 The story exists in countless forms across Europe, Asia and Africa. There’s the one most Americans know — about a little girl in a red cloak who gets eaten by a wolf dressed as her grandmother. But there’s also a version from East Asia in which a leopard disguised as a grandmother persuades a group of sisters to let him into the house, eating one of the girls before the others escape. Then there’s the story from central Africa of a girl who is tricked by an ogre pretending to be her brother, gets eaten, and is only released when her brother tracks the ogre down and kills the impostor. All of them share traits with another type of story known as “The Wolf and the Kids” in which a group of goat kids are devoured by a wolf who tricks them into thinking it’s their mother. 
 
 By analyzing the language, characters and plots from these tales — the stories’ “genes,” so to speak — Tehrani constructed a family tree of the type you might see in an exhibit at a natural history museum. Starting with a single shared ancestor that arose somewhere between Europe and the Middle East about 2,000 years ago, the stories branched off into the groups that would be classified as ATU 333 and ATU 123. The 333 family line would give rise to the familiar Grimm version of Red, while the African version is actually more closely related to the 123 family. The East Asian version, he concluded, is a 333 relative that borrowed some traits from its 123 cousins. 
 
 The research offered an interesting look at how stories evolve, but Tehrani argued that its effect is more than just academic. 
 
 “Folktales, more than any other type of story, embody our shared fantasies, fears and experiences,” he wrote in 2013. “Understanding which elements of them remain stable and which ones change as they get transmitted across generations and societies can therefore provide a unique window into universal and variable aspects of the human condition.” 
 
 Tehrani tackled his next project with that goal in mind. Along with da Silva, who studies intersections between evolution and literature at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, he pieced together phylogenetic trees for 275 story types from the “Tales of Magic” category in the ATU system. 
 
 In 76 cases, the duo was able to trace the story back hundreds or even thousands of years. The oldest of them is a tale about a blacksmith who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for unmatched smithing powers and who uses them to pin the Devil down, allowing the smith to keep his soul and his new abilities. That tale dates back 6,000 years, to the beginning of the Bronze Age. 
 
 If true, this finding may clear up some confusion about the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language speakers who first started telling that story. Very little is known about the people who launched the language family that would come to encompass everything from Sanskrit and Urdu to Latin and English. As Mark Damen, a historian at Utah State University explains it: 
 
 “There is still no unequivocal evidence from either historical or archaeological sources for exactly where, when or how the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived. No site, no technology, no extant historical text, no particular past event has as yet been definitively associated with the people whose descendants would later spread Indo-European culture and language across the entire globe. The Indo-Europeans are at present in strictest terms a linguistic phenomenon, which is not to say their culture never existed — there is overwhelming evidence it must have at some point in history and, without doubt, somewhere in Eurasia — but that’s not very precise.” 
 
 Still, there are generally two schools of thought about where a huge number of the world’s cultural origins might have been. One proposes that Proto-Indo-European language speakers were Neolithic farmers living 9,000 years ago in what is now Turkey, while the second argues that they were pastoralists from the Russian steppes who knew how to work metal. 
 
 If it’s true that “The Smith and the Devil” — a story now told in numerous Indo-European languages — really does date back 6,000 years, it could be a boon for the latter school of thought. The 9,000-year-old Turks lived before the invention of metallurgy and were unlikely to have told a story whose hero was a blacksmith. Those Russian pastoralists, on the other hand, fit the bill perfectly. Reconstructed versions of the Indo-European vocabulary include a possible word for metal, according to da Silva and Tehrani’s study, and the fact that these people lived at the beginning of the Bronze Age “suggests a plausible context for the cultural evolution of a tale about a cunning smith who attains a superhuman level of mastery over his craft.” 
 
 But this detail was also a sticking point with some other researchers who read the study. John Lindow, a folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Science News that the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary for working with metal was fairly limited. It’s not clear that the term “smith” even existed, he argued, which casts doubt on the claim that “The Smith and the Devil” is as old and significant as Tehrani and da Silva say. 
 
 But Tehrani rebutted that argument. And speaking to the Atlantic, he was already envisioning future research into why some tales are told for thousands of years, and what plot elements or motifs seem to persist through the various retellings. 
 
 “We think this is the start of a much bigger project using oral traditions and storytelling as windows into the lives of our ancestors,” he said. 
 
 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who started that same project 150 years ago, would probably be proud. ||||| Tekhelet was produced from the yellow glandular secretion of the Murex trunculus snail. Dipped into the solution for the dye, the fabrics turned blue after a brief exposure to air and sunlight. 
 
 In accordance with the biblical commandment, tekhelet was used to dye the tassels, or tzitzit, attached to the four-cornered garment worn by Jews. It was also used as the color of ceremonial robes donned by high priests in the Jerusalem Temple. 
 
 Israeli researchers have identified three rare 2000-year-old fabrics that were dyed using one of the most expensive materials in antiquity -- a snail known as Murex trunculus. Read the article. 
 
 Many well known fairy tales predate the existence of modern European languages and major world religions, finds new research. 
 
 The findings, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, open up the possibility that popular folktales influenced writings in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible and other religious works. They also negate the claims of some scholars who have held that most traditional fairy tales originated much more recently. 
 
 "Versions of 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Rumplestiltskin' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' have probably been around since before the existence of many modern European languages, like English, German, Russian and French, and would have originally been told in a now extinct ancestral language from which those tongues evolved," co-author Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University told Discovery News. 
 
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 Tehrani added, “It is difficult to put precise dates on such things, but we're looking in the region of 4–6,000 years old.” 
 
 Tehrani and co-author Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon investigated whether 275 Indo-European fairy tales were more likely to be shared by closely related populations than more distantly related ones. They tested whether the sharing of the tales could be predicted by how close populations were geographically, or by how related their languages are. 
 
 The process enabled the researchers to separate the effects of tales traveling between neighboring groups (such as through trade or migrations) from tales that had been inherited from common ancestral groups. This narrowed the number of tales down to 76 whose distributions could be primarily explained by common heritage. 
 
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 The researchers next mapped the 76 tales on a "family tree" of Indo-European languages to see how far the stories could be traced back, using the same techniques that biologists utilize to reconstruct the evolution of genetically inherited traits. 
 
 One of the oldest tales of the bunch was determined to be "The Smith and the Devil," in which a blacksmith sells his soul to a devil/evil spirit in return for the power to weld any materials together. The blacksmith then uses that power to attach the devil to a stool or tree, and only releases the devil on the condition that he may keep his soul. 
 
 "We trace this tale back to the Bronze Age ancestors of the Indo-European language family," Tehrani said. ||||| Image copyright PA Image caption Researchers found Beauty and the Beast was about 4,000 years old 
 
 Fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast can be traced back thousands of years, according to researchers at universities in Durham and Lisbon. 
 
 Using techniques normally employed by biologists, academics studied links between stories from around the world and found some had prehistoric roots. 
 
 They found some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age. 
 
 The stories had been thought to date back to the 16th and 17th Centuries. 
 
 Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, said Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure, and could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago. 
 
 Analysis showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. 
 
 And a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age. 
 
 Once upon a time... 
 
 A blacksmith strikes a deal with a malevolent supernatural being, such as the Devil, Death or a genie. 
 
 The blacksmith exchanges his soul for the power to weld any materials together. 
 
 He then uses this power to stick the villain to an immovable object, such as a tree, to renege on his side of the bargain. 
 
 This basic plot is stable throughout the Indo-European speaking world, from India to Scandinavia, according to the research. 
 
 The study said this tale could be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European society when metallurgy likely existed and there was archaeological and genetic evidence of massive territorial expansions by nomadic tribes from the Pontic steppe (the northern shores of the Black Sea) between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. 
 
 However, John Lindow, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley, casts doubt on the theory in Science News, saying the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary for working with metal was limited and the word "smith" might not have existed. 
 
 If true, that would mean the version of "The Smith and the Devil" used in the study may not be that old, he said. 
 
 'Pretty remarkable' 
 
 Dr Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon, said: "We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. 
 
 "They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language." 
 
 In the 19th Century, authors the Brothers Grimm believed many of the fairy tales they popularised, including Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, were rooted in a shared cultural history dating back to the birth of the Indo-European language family. 
 
 Later thinkers challenged that view, saying some stories were much younger and had been passed into oral tradition, having first been written down by writers from the 16th and 17th Centuries. 
 
 Dr Jamie Tehrani said: "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm. 
 
 "Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology - some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts - but our findings suggest they are much older than that." 
 
 Image copyright PA Image caption The Brothers Grimm correctly believed the stories they popularised went back further than earliest literary records, academics said 
 
 'Biology toolkit' 
 
 The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, employed phylogenetic methods to investigate the relationships between population histories and cultural phenomena, such as languages, marriage practices, political institutions, material culture and music. 
 
 It also used a "tree" of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time. 
 
 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. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– Many traditional fairy tales, long thought to be a somewhat recent invention, have actually been around for thousands of years, according to a new study. "Versions of Beauty and the Beast, Rumplestiltskin, and Jack and the Beanstalk have probably been around since before the existence of many modern European languages, like English, German, Russian, and French, and would have originally been told in a now extinct ancestral language from which those tongues evolved," co-author Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University tells Discovery News. He estimates that some such tales pre-date the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, having been in existence as many as 4,000 to 6,000 years, and may have actually influenced the Bible and other religious texts. Generally, fairy tales have been believed to date back to just the 16th or 17th centuries, though the Brothers Grimm long believed the stories they transcribed and popularized were actually much older, the BBC reports. "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm," Tehrani tells the BBC. "Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record." Tehrani, an anthropologist, and fellow researcher Sara Graça da Silva, a folklorist, used phylogenetic methods more commonly used by biologists to come to their conclusions. Discovery reports they looked at 275 Indo-European fairy tales, narrowing those down to 76 that had likely been passed down through a closely-related group and mapping those onto a "family tree" of Indo-European languages in order to trace them back to a common ancestor. By analyzing common languages and geographical proximity, the Guardian reports, the researchers determined how far back they could trace the tales. The stories we know today evolved, much like humans, the Washington Post explains, and the tree showed that evolution. Jack and the Beanstalk, for example, is part of a group of stories the researchers called "The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure," which can be traced back 5,000 years to when there was a language split, according to the Guardian. (Another recent study has bad news for Cinderella.)