Phylogenetic analyses suggests fairy tales are much older than thought

January 20, 2016 10:51 PM

To come to these conclusions, the researchers applied a technique normally used in biology—building phylogenetic trees to trace linguistic attributes back to their origin....one fairy tale in particular, they note, was very clear—called The Smith and The Devil, they traced it back approximately 6,000 years, to the Bronze Age.
posted by bq (35 comments total)

Very interesting but without reading the actual paper, hard not to be a little sceptical. Were there even smiths shoeing horses in the Bronze Age?
posted by Segundus at 11:25 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Such history of the horseshoe that I can find suggest the nailed on horseshoe isn't much more than a thousand years old, so it seems unlikely.
posted by tavella at 11:34 PM on January 20, 2016

Isn't http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150645 the actual paper?
posted by dragoon at 11:37 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Perhaps metal smiths made other objects before the invention of the horseshoe and story changed with as the smith's duties did.

Probably didn't start out with saints and such either.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 11:40 PM on January 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Some historians of the Ancient world on my twitter feed pretty much said 'no shit sherlock' - they pointed out that there are plenty of 'fairytale' style tropes in, for e.g. Bablylonian records, dating to at least 4k years ago so...
There is something in here about the application (whether appropriate or not) of STEM methodologies to humanities scholarship, and it's worrying if it's then used to erase the work already done in those fields (or make claims as if they were fresh/new/suddenly 'really proven' this time/etc).
posted by AFII at 11:48 PM on January 20, 2016 [24 favorites]

If you are going to keep goats ( 10-11k years ago ), you have to learn to take care of hooves. It seems pretty easy to document a change from a leather hoove bandage to an iron shoe.
posted by ridgerunner at 11:50 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia says horses were domesticated around 3500 BC, and bronze working began in 3300 BC. This seems incompatible with the claim that the story is 6000 years old. Fortunately the paper sheds some light:

The likely presence of this tale in the last common ancestor of Indo-European-speaking cultures resonates strongly with wider debates in Indo-European prehistory, since it implies the existence of metallurgy in Proto-Indo-European society. This inference is consistent with the so-called ‘Kurgan hypothesis’, which links the origins of the Indo-European language family to archaeological and genetic evidence of massive territorial expansions made by nomadic pastoralist tribes from the Pontic steppe 5000–6000 years ago.

So maybe the story is only 5000 years old, at which time it is plausible that someone was familiar with both bronze and horses. Or, maybe the story is 5500 years old, and the original story involved a copper smith. Or, maybe the story really is 6000 years old, and the horses were added later.
posted by foobaz at 12:02 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

psycho-alchemy,
I like your hypothesis better than mine.
posted by ridgerunner at 12:04 AM on January 21, 2016

Not sure why we're concerned about horses. If you look at the relevant section of the paper there is no mention of horses at all.

"The basic plot of this tale—which is stable throughout the Indo-European speaking world, from India to Scandinavia—concerns a blacksmith who strikes a deal with a malevolent supernatural being (e.g. the Devil, Death, a jinn, etc.). The smith exchanges his soul for the power to weld any materials together, which he then uses to stick the villain to an immovable object (e.g. a tree) to renege on his side of the bargain."
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:19 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

I lack the expertise to assess the methodology, but the conclusions do resonate with me (studied folklore at uni, wrote honours thesis on beauty and the beast).

I think the enduring nature of fairy tales has much to do with their malleability - critics frequently get bogged down in one iteration. Whilst, perhaps, creation myths and tales explaining natural phenomena may lose some relevance, the rich field of human relations has yielded similar harvest for thousands of years.

We still love; fight; feel pride and shame; hope and despair. And we still, and hopefully ever will, attempt to understand these feelings, give meaning to them, share them, and celebrate them. Surely that is a condition of being human. And that develops into the urge to tell stories.
posted by smoke at 12:22 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]

Guys, you're thinking of that famous folktale "The Farrier and the Devil," this one's just about some bronzeworker.
posted by 3urypteris at 12:23 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

If the story is 5000 years old, surely you can link to a version that doesn't star Jesus and St. Peter?
posted by straight at 12:28 AM on January 21, 2016

Ooops. I realized that's actually a stupid comment, roughly equivalent to, "If the genus Homo is really 2 million years old, surely you can introduce me to a Neanderthal?"
posted by straight at 12:32 AM on January 21, 2016 [8 favorites]

How can that story be so old when it is written in English?????
posted by nom de poop at 12:58 AM on January 21, 2016 [39 favorites]

I read this article because I completely mis-parsed the FPP title and didn't think it made any sense - how can fairy tales be older than human thinking? Actually it's a much more mundane (and plausible!) claim, that fairy tales are older than previously thought.
posted by Dysk at 1:50 AM on January 21, 2016 [10 favorites]

Some historians of the Ancient world on my twitter feed pretty much said 'no shit sherlock' - they pointed out that there are plenty of 'fairytale' style tropes in, for e.g. Bablylonian records, dating to at least 4k years ago so...

There certainly seem to be types of stories that people like telling and so get repeated, even when there is no direct transmission. And elements get transmitted across cultures as well.

But based on the article's summary, the paper is arguing something else: transmission of a story that was composed once, plus a scientific technique to date when the original composition was. It seems a much stronger claim than having noted "fairy tale style tropes."
posted by mark k at 1:57 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

The real surprise is that the shaggy dog story predates the domestication of the dog.
posted by peeedro at 2:15 AM on January 21, 2016 [16 favorites]

It's a cool paper. The general methodology is rock solid. Whether the transition model they have employed is realistic is very hard to know, but interesting to think about.

It's not usually actual historians who get upset about this stuff, but those older cultural anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists raised on a diet of anti-number junk food by a poststructuralist cargo cult. Luckily, all such things will pass in time - ask a blacksmith.
posted by cromagnon at 3:29 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

But based on the article's summary, the paper is arguing something else: transmission of a story that was composed once, plus a scientific technique to date when the original composition was. It seems a much stronger claim than having noted "fairy tale style tropes."

Sure, and that's where the claim sounds rather exaggerated. As the comments up-thread have shown with just one story, we're left with the question of whether it's sensible to claim a single origin for a story in the way this paper assumes has happened. Clearly The Smith and the Devil could not have been about a Smith at somepoint as we go backwards, and before that there are probably points where it's not likely to be the Devil (a djinn? an evil spirit?), and before that it's not going to have made sense to have a binary heaven/hell thing going on in there and before that...

Or, to convert it right back to the STEM similie: we can use similar techniques to show when we shared a common ancestor with an ape. But claiming that the ancestor is either 'a human' or 'an ape' is a bit silly, as is claiming all the intermediary versions are essentially the 'same' animal, as is claiming that the common ancestor appeared from nowhere and was a one-off creation not borrowing from any other existing living organism. That's kinda what they're doing here with folk stories.

Oh, and FWIW I am an 'actual historian' so perhaps less of the sweeping assertions and implied put downs about what 'actual historian' think or feel, huh.
posted by AFII at 3:31 AM on January 21, 2016 [10 favorites]

This is just going to fuel the eye-rolling claim of know-it-all assholes everywhere, who contend that every story has already been told with the kind of authoritative smugness that sneering teenybopper tautologists relish above nearly all things.
posted by sonascope at 4:32 AM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

So sonascope, you are saying that Shakespeare stole material that predated him even more?

It's thought that the Egyptians invented toothpaste, but last I looked the oldest brands I knew of were either Crest or Colgate. Shakespeare had a better publicist than the Egyptians. Possibly not better teeth though.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:15 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

The essence of the story is of a clever man defeating a supposedly all-powerful supernatural evil. That trope probably goes back to the beginning of storytelling; and I'd venture that the beginning of storytelling goes back to the perfection of language. We interpret the world according to stories we've been told; I suspect that we are hardwired to interpret stories in the same way that we're hardwired to be able to parse language.

Smiths have always been admired and feared. The ability to smelt a hard metal (bronze) out of two soft metals (copper and tin) would probably have been seen by everyone else as sort of magical, and its secrets would have been closely kept by the smiths. Blacksmiths were traditionally regarded as having arcane knowledge on par with witches.

So I have no trouble believing that a story of a smith outwitting the devil (or a rakshasa, or a djinni) goes back to when Hector was a pup. What's interesting is the application of the phylogenetic tree structure, suggesting that the story was invented once and then spread and mutated. That, too, is not inconceivable. The alphabet was invented exactly once; every other alphabet is genetically related to the one we're using, that the Greeks got from the Phoenicians.
posted by musofire at 5:15 AM on January 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's healthy to be skeptical of scientific claims and read the paper and assess their methods and conclusions and see whether you think the claims are reasonable. A critical step there is reading the paper. It's also sometimes worth giving researchers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to interpretations of their research in popular media.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:11 AM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

Or, to convert it right back to the STEM similie: we can use similar techniques to show when we shared a common ancestor with an ape.

We are apes. The common ancestor of all apes was an ape, by definition - the first ape, in fact. And apes are exactly and only those individuals descended from that ancestor. That's the only essential "sameness" apes have to have. There are some shared physical features, but semantically they're rather unimportant.

as is claiming that the common ancestor appeared from nowhere

This isn't right: you're conflating tree with trait, or in this case the language-group phylogeny with the folk tales. They are not assuming independent origins of any language group - the language tree stops in the past at PIE only because that's a useful place to put the edge of the domain defined by the folk tale data.

They are stating that the folk tales are each discrete units: they do not interact with each other by combining or changing, and the presence of a tale in one language group is not conditional upon the presence of another. This is the transition model I mentioned upthread.

It's important to know that there is no technical limitation that imposes these conditions - if you want folk tales to transfer content, that's fine. There's even an off-the-shelf biological model: estimation of plasmid transmission across bacterial strain phylogenies. In short, if we can describe the mode of folk tale evolution in terms of (conditional) probability then this technique will map and date that evolution given the data. If we can't describe the mode of evolution in this way then either we don't know enough (which is great, let's go find out) or we're confident enough to assert that there are no commonalities and no stationary process to model. That's an extreme position to take, and one which needs support.
posted by cromagnon at 6:19 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

The alphabet was invented exactly once; every other alphabet is genetically related to the one we're using, that the Greeks got from the Phoenicians.

Depending on how exactly you want to define "invented" and "genetically related," I believe Ogham and the Cherokee alphabet are the two semi exceptions to that, although of course to the extent they represent reinvention they were created by people who had knowledge of other alphabets.
posted by PMdixon at 6:23 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

This isn't right: you're conflating tree with trait, or in this case the language-group phylogeny with the folk tales

No, I don't think I am - I may be guilty of simplifying, but then that's also the issue with the way the scientists involved are promoting their work here; they have pretty explicitly been claiming a 'single origin' for folk tales in the publicity surrounding this paper.

The point, rephrased, is the same as this one: They are stating that the folk tales are each discrete units: they do not interact with each other by combining or changing, and the presence of a tale in one language group is not conditional upon the presence of another - that is, a set of conditions that I do not think are very sensible. The features of stories aren't genes; the 'phylogenetic' study of language is, if anything, even more contingent and contentious than the phylogenetic study of, er, genetics. So, yeah, there's a lot to pick up on here.

I would like to know more from linguists/language experts about the broader discussions this feeds into, for sure.
posted by AFII at 6:38 AM on January 21, 2016

The alphabet was invented exactly once; every other alphabet is genetically related to the one we're using, that the Greeks got from the Phoenicians.

Hangul?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:46 AM on January 21, 2016

They are stating that the folk tales are each discrete units: they do not interact with each other by combining or changing, and the presence of a tale in one language group is not conditional upon the presence of another. This is the transition model I mentioned upthread.


So, on the issue of "borrowing" traits, and in this case, folk tales have been addressed to a certain extent by linguists working with these methods. Luckily for us, evolutionary biologists have the same problems: horizontal gene transfer, and current phylogenetic methods can deal with instances of horizontal gene transfer/borrowings to a certain extent, which, if you look in the paper, they have done, in section 2.4:

Since many closely related Indo-European populations are also geographical nearest neighbours (figure 1), it is possible that the apparent non-random clumping of tales on the phylogeny may be the result of regional diffusion between societies. To address this issue, we employed an approach developed by Towner et al. [33] for fitting binary cultural traits to an autologistic model built on phylogenetic and spatial neighbour graphs (electronic supplementary material, figure S2). The model predicts the probability of a trait being present or absent in any given society from the state of the trait in its surrounding spatial and phylogenetic neighbours. The influences of these local dependencies are measured by parameters for phylogenetic (λ) and spatial (θ) proximity, with a level parameter (β) employed to control for frequency-of-occurrence. The likelihood of each parameter is estimated through MCMC simulations using the Gibbs sampler [34] to generate trait states (see [33] for a detailed explanation).
posted by damayanti at 7:01 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm disappointed that the linked version of the Smith and the Devil leaves off the classic ending bit common in the Appalachian version of Wicked John and the Devil. In that telling, the Devil, after barring Wicked John from entering Hell, gives him a piece of goal in order to go start his own Hell. Thus the folktale acts to explain the appearance of will o'wisps in the southeastern forests; that's just Wicked John wandering about with his piece of coal.
posted by Panjandrum at 7:21 AM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sure, and that's where the claim sounds rather exaggerated.

The sentence that I responded to was "this is some obvious and well known shit," not "this paper is making ambitious claims it can't support." These are opposite comments about the paper, although of course you can think both about different parts of the same paper.

As the comments up-thread have shown with just one story, we're left with the question of whether it's sensible to claim a single origin for a story in the way this paper assumes has happened.

The papers' basic argument is that if, say, Romanians tell a set of the same stories as Italians, Spanish and Portugese, but the stories are absent from the folklore of Bulagrians, Hungarians, Ruthenians or Germans, then those stories would have originated somewhere in the Latin family tree and been transmitted downwards. As opposed to being common to Christianity or a local geographic area or are common human themes. Then they say the correlations between similarities of tales in different groups actually supports the common origin for some stories. Whether this is true or not, it doesn't seem an outrageous line of inquiry.

FWIW, I'm also generally quite skeptical of neat mathematical methods applied to history and this case is no exception. Folklorists have spent a lot of time cataloging stories--including as I understand exact wording changes in overlaps in different oral traditions--so maybe there's enough data to try this approach and push back the transmission history deeper? But I'm certainly not going to believe a single paper with a new technique.

In terms of my comments here, it's just that it's more interesting (as a layman) to see people criticize the strong claims in the paper, if they disagree, than to ignore the novel parts.
posted by mark k at 7:51 AM on January 21, 2016

I'm fascinated by the way the role of Jesus in that tale is sort of the Trickster god who I guess teaches the Smith by example how to trick the Devil and gives him the power to do so but doesn't do much of anything to get him into heaven.
posted by straight at 8:14 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

> Hangul?

It's thought that five of the Hangul letters came from 'Phagspa, which evolved from Tibetan and so on back to the Phoenicians, and the rest of the Hangul consonants are modifications of these. The story about the basic core consonants depicting positions of the tongue seems to be a retcon, or at best a scheme guiding Sejong in making his modifications.
posted by finka at 9:12 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jesus is like Oh yeah cool is that your hammer NBD just going to use it to heal A PERSON
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:49 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not even for a reason, just to be like BOOM you're not so great.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:49 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you want more Jesus as badass, there's always the Dream of the Rood, one of the earliest Christian poems in Old English, which imagines the cross saying:

Then saw I mankind’s Lord
come with great courage when he would mount on me.
Then dared I not against the Lord’s word
bend or break, when I saw earth’s
fields shake. All fiends
I could have felled, but I stood fast.
The young hero stripped himself – he, God Almighty –
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.
I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth,
fall to earth’s fields, but had to stand fast.
Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.

posted by straight at 6:44 PM on January 21, 2016