The method could be compared to a cake recipe as follows:
1. Take 275 tales. These can be found in any specialist ‘Tales of Magic’ delicatessen or curiosity shop.
2. Separate the yolks from the whites. In other words the presence or absence of these tales in 50 Indo-European speaking populations.
3. Mix with a smattering of jargon and statistics. I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible.
4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages).
5. Remove from the oven and cool. Ice the cake by skimming over debates of written versus oral narrative, and the distinctions or overlaps between them.
The written-oral debate acknowledges that there is a difficulty in tracing oral stories because tales are so easily transportable by travellers. There has been interaction of oral and written texts overtime, with one informing the other (Bottingheimer 2009, 2014). This basically means that what is an oral folktale, and each tales origins is unclear.
For example, different renditions of Arabian Nights indicated that translators created new stories inspired from oral and literary traditions (Warner 2012: 18). While this demonstrates some of the issues with the paper’s source materials it also illustrates how fearless Graça da Silva and Tehrani (2016) were trying to tackle the complex subject of oral folklore utilising new methodologies.
6. To finish the cake, sprinkle the results with statistics to see whether the 275 tales were more likely to spread generation to generation or across geographical areas due to migration, trade, and encounters between groups of people.
Yes, this is always the case. The approach might be the best we've got, but it doesn't inspire confidence that we are uncovering some underlying truth.
Whether or not this is the case, an ad hominem attack against the race of the authors and a strawman that presents their method as a cake recipe only convinces me about the reviewer being an asshole. One could turn the proof of the Pythagorean theorem into a cake recipe in a way that makes it sound ridiculous and unscientific.
> 4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages).
Seems superfluous; there are cases where we know good and well that a story was transmitted without much in the way of cultural contact. For example, Cinderella comes from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian
We don't know anything about the path of transmission or the intermediate stories that must have existed in locations between China and Italy, but it is plain that the stories are the same.
I can't take seriously a review that includes the criticism "I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible."
That "recipe" is completely unhelpful in explaining the method. It boils down to the author saying "it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo I don't understand, therefore it's wrong".
But I largely agree that it's a stretch.
As far as I understand it, they discovered a correlation between phylogenetic markers in historical populations and the presence of these folktales in their cultures. Which is completely unsurprising, populations that mix genetics will share stories.
From this, they link "The Smith and the Devil" to the genetic marker ATU 330 (going back to the Bronze Age), which is the only story they could trace back.
> The Bayesian ancestral state reconstructions failed to support the presence of three out of the four tales that were tentatively inferred in Proto-Indo-European (table 2). However, the analyses reconstructed one tale, ATU 330 ‘The Smith and the Devil’, in this corpus, with a posterior probability of 87%. A fossil test returned positive support for the presence of ATU 330 (Bayes Factor 3.59).
It's not nothing, it's plausible, but I wouldn't call it "evidence".
> [we] find evidence that one tale (‘The Smith and the Devil’) can be traced back to the Bronze Age
Even if a story is correlated to a genetic marker, it doesn't mean they originated at the same time. Although it might be possible to infer that the story originated in a certain population before it got mixed with others, maybe. Is that what the paper is saying? I'd need more time with it.
PS: The Smith and the Devil (claimed to be 6K yo) is well knows in Basque culture, there's a pretty fun movie from 2017: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592878/
It is impossible to trace back the origin of stories in our past without either written documents or oral traditions. Everything else is made up correlations and patterns.
A sentence like "The results of the analyses suggested that a substantial number of tales exhibit significant correlations with linguistic relationships that are consistent with vertical processes of cultural inheritance." is just empty words. It is baseless speculation covered in a scientific jargon, and what Harry Frankfurt would call Bullshit.
You could as well write "The results of the bullshit suggested that a bullshit number of tales exhibit bullshit correlations with bullshit relationships that are bullshit with bullshit processes of cultural bullshit".
There is a large part of the academic community where everything that matters is producing academic-sounding material to stay relevant, get more money and continue doing bullshit.
Now, the interesting thing is that the actual conclusion of the paper is actually true - fairytales share a common root, we see the same stories worldwide, and this has been known in mythology and psychology for a long time. But this research does not add anything new, and forgets to mention the interesting aspects well-known in comparative mythology.
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” - Harry G. Frankfurt
It might also be academic endeavour that is worth doing for its own sake. Everybody works, everybody eats - and some people work doing things like this because all the useful jobs are taken.
Weird, but it's done us proud so far as a species.
Historical linguistics is based on the analysis and comparison of written documents and existing languages (so-called "attested languages"). Past languages are infered either from different languages (comparative) or from a single language (internal). All of this is already very speculative and likely wrong most of the time, especially when internal, but at least you can discover some patterns.
What you can't do with linguistics, is infer the existence of stories in the past just because they exist in the present. Language just does not have this kind of data stored.
Let's say 4000 year's ago some guy told a fairy tale about a wolf and someone else wrote it on some kind of paper-like material. Then the people died and the paper got destroyed. At some point the entire culture of this guy disappeared, and only the basic language survived into a new culture. So how do you figure out today that a certain story existed back then? Short answer, you can't. We don't even know that the entire culture existed, let alone a story within that culture.
The authors claim to be able to show that "oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record" and trace back a story to the Bronze Age. As I just explained, this is impossible to do with linguistics.
Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]."
Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact.
They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.
if (for the sake of argument) the words dog and wolf and fox have jointly evolved in an apparent way over time, phonetically and morphologically, from proto-indo-european to modern descendent languages, and so have some other words like grapes and manger and cry and villagers, and these modern cultures have similar but different shared stories about dogs in mangers, foxes and grapes, and crying wolf so the villagers will come, and the differences between the stories across cultures just so happens to be in concordance with the evolution of those words, I'd say that is evidence of a shared origin for the stories.
I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.
The study is not about shared origins. Everyone knows that many stories have shared origins. To know this, one just has to analyze the historical texts and development of certain stories during the last hundreds of years.
The Babylonian confusion was common sense for the last 1000-2000 years.
The study is about claiming some specific stories are definitely 6000 years old just because some shady analysis based on nothing but thin air.
Historical linguistics works with non-existent languages. Making assumptions about a non-existent language is one thing, but claiming to know both the time when those languages were spoken and the stories that were told is pure hybris (Lyle Campbell and Paul Heggarty refuse to believe in so-called glossochronology).
The entire field of historical linguistics is pure speculation without any hard evidence. It is impossible to know languages that do not exist anymore or have no written sources.
The Australian linguist Robert Dixon rightfully said that the proponents of far-reaching linguistic affinities undercut the level of what constitutes good science “to the point of nonsense”. He explains that languages can not be reconstructed.
> 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”
There are thematic similarities between the ancient Indo-European religions. In the Germanic branch, there are the Norns, three female beings responsible for the fates of humanity. There are the three Moirai, the Fates, in Greek mythology. There are the three mothers, also responsible for humanity's fate, in Celtic mythology. Fifteen hundred years later, there are three "weird sisters" in Macbeth.
These cultures shared substantial mythology. Greek mythology c 500 BC and Norse mythology c 800 AD have some two thousand years of separation between the branches, and yet substantial common elements - themes, story elements if you wish - remain. Of course, some degree of exchange was going on the whole time. It's not like these themes were preserved in isolation. The ancients themselves often noticed these connections - and sometimes made connections where there actually weren't any historically, e.g. between Egyptian and Greek gods.
I am reminded of two ancient novels. Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and Lucian's True Story. Both are, essentially, fantasy novels - satirical fantasy novels, highly aware of the existing mythological and fantastical traditions of their time, and they rip them apart.
In the Metamorphoses by Apuleius (a reference to Ovid's very serious treatment of Roman mythology in the also-titled Metamorphoses) the protagonist (spoilers!) very much wishes to become a wizard and gets himself accidentally turned into a sentient donkey - who is promptly sold to a disputable cult leader, and then the comical misfortunes really begin. To the modern eye it's almost impossible to not read it as placing a Roman noble in the body of a beast of burden, but with the soul of a man, and interpreting it as a critique of slavery, while telling funny stories, commenting on Roman beliefs, and indeed, making fun of many of the fantastical themes common at the time. Though if the slavery commentary is really what Apuleius intended is controversial; he may not have seen the irony we see and may have just been having fun.
Lucian's True Story is just completely over the top, it starts with being lost in the Atlantic ocean and washing up on a tropical magical island, and ends with a war with the inhabitants of the Moon.
I bring them up because, having come relatively later to the classics, reading them for the first time as an adult, I remember being constantly surprised with a sense of novelty yet familiarity. Surely these ideas are not so old?
In Elizabeth Barber's Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) there's a passage where, on the basis of reconstructed PIE roots, she posits what we're fairly sure the proto-indo europeans were getting up to in the evenings around their campfires, and many of the activities are very familiar indeed. (literally so: some of the reconstructed verbs being activities which may lead to family formation)
I would think that everything old is older than we think. Because we're almost certainly not correct about how old anything is - and it certainly can't be any younger.
So headlines like this always make me smile a bit.
But still, new evidence is always super interesting.
> While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The "reconstructions" of the authors are based on fantasy. They try to sidestep the massive problem of possible literary origins by manufacturing data with their magical phylogenetic device. It's garbage in, garbage out.
he meant that any evidence we have puts a ... "floor" on how old something is, but it doesn't rule out it being even older. He wasn't using "we think" to mean "we imagine", he was using it to mean "we believe from evidence"
This is really interesting research but I do have some misgivings. Whole languages does not just randomly jump from one population to another - but stories can, it just require a single travelling storyteller.
And what they track is not full stories but “tropes” like woman marries magic animal who is really a man under a spell. It it really impossible that this trope could have appeared indepently in mutiple places?
I had the good fortune to be gifted this as a child. The book itself is a treasure, both verbally and visually (the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich commissioned illustrations specifically for the collection). But the real staying power is returning again and again to the stories, and recognising that these are ... not archetypes, but ... I'm struggling to find the right word, perhaps examplars of a type or class.
This struck me a few years ago as I was re-familiarising myself with Greek and Roman mythology, and as I was reading of Pyramis and Thisbe realised "hey, this is Romeo and Juliet!" Sure enough, that seems to be a fairly well-established connection. And the idea that far older primordial tales have reached us, often through multiple paths and variations, seems highly probable.
There's also the notion of a period in such traditions made their way from oral to written traditions, often in the context of urbanisation and the establishment of empires. This has strong relations to what's called the Axial Age, roughly 800-200 BCE, in which the great cultures of Western (Greek), Indian (Hindu), and Chinese (Confucian), amongst others, theologies and philosophies emerged. Whilst oral traditions can transmit information over generations, it's often lossy and inexact. Writing has as both a strength and curse the property of fixing ideas in a specific representation (though subject to its own agents of change and decay), as famously feared by Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus". The concerns seem quaint to us, largely because we're in the world those influences created. Socrates was speaking from the Before Times. A condition we might apply to ourselves on occasion as well.
32 comments
[ 29.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadQuote:
The method could be compared to a cake recipe as follows:
1. Take 275 tales. These can be found in any specialist ‘Tales of Magic’ delicatessen or curiosity shop.
2. Separate the yolks from the whites. In other words the presence or absence of these tales in 50 Indo-European speaking populations.
3. Mix with a smattering of jargon and statistics. I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible.
4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages).
5. Remove from the oven and cool. Ice the cake by skimming over debates of written versus oral narrative, and the distinctions or overlaps between them.
The written-oral debate acknowledges that there is a difficulty in tracing oral stories because tales are so easily transportable by travellers. There has been interaction of oral and written texts overtime, with one informing the other (Bottingheimer 2009, 2014). This basically means that what is an oral folktale, and each tales origins is unclear.
For example, different renditions of Arabian Nights indicated that translators created new stories inspired from oral and literary traditions (Warner 2012: 18). While this demonstrates some of the issues with the paper’s source materials it also illustrates how fearless Graça da Silva and Tehrani (2016) were trying to tackle the complex subject of oral folklore utilising new methodologies.
6. To finish the cake, sprinkle the results with statistics to see whether the 275 tales were more likely to spread generation to generation or across geographical areas due to migration, trade, and encounters between groups of people.
7. Eat the cake.
Seems superfluous; there are cases where we know good and well that a story was transmitted without much in the way of cultural contact. For example, Cinderella comes from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian
We don't know anything about the path of transmission or the intermediate stories that must have existed in locations between China and Italy, but it is plain that the stories are the same.
But I largely agree that it's a stretch.
As far as I understand it, they discovered a correlation between phylogenetic markers in historical populations and the presence of these folktales in their cultures. Which is completely unsurprising, populations that mix genetics will share stories.
From this, they link "The Smith and the Devil" to the genetic marker ATU 330 (going back to the Bronze Age), which is the only story they could trace back.
> The Bayesian ancestral state reconstructions failed to support the presence of three out of the four tales that were tentatively inferred in Proto-Indo-European (table 2). However, the analyses reconstructed one tale, ATU 330 ‘The Smith and the Devil’, in this corpus, with a posterior probability of 87%. A fossil test returned positive support for the presence of ATU 330 (Bayes Factor 3.59).
It's not nothing, it's plausible, but I wouldn't call it "evidence".
> [we] find evidence that one tale (‘The Smith and the Devil’) can be traced back to the Bronze Age
Even if a story is correlated to a genetic marker, it doesn't mean they originated at the same time. Although it might be possible to infer that the story originated in a certain population before it got mixed with others, maybe. Is that what the paper is saying? I'd need more time with it.
PS: The Smith and the Devil (claimed to be 6K yo) is well knows in Basque culture, there's a pretty fun movie from 2017: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592878/
It is impossible to trace back the origin of stories in our past without either written documents or oral traditions. Everything else is made up correlations and patterns.
A sentence like "The results of the analyses suggested that a substantial number of tales exhibit significant correlations with linguistic relationships that are consistent with vertical processes of cultural inheritance." is just empty words. It is baseless speculation covered in a scientific jargon, and what Harry Frankfurt would call Bullshit.
You could as well write "The results of the bullshit suggested that a bullshit number of tales exhibit bullshit correlations with bullshit relationships that are bullshit with bullshit processes of cultural bullshit".
There is a large part of the academic community where everything that matters is producing academic-sounding material to stay relevant, get more money and continue doing bullshit.
Now, the interesting thing is that the actual conclusion of the paper is actually true - fairytales share a common root, we see the same stories worldwide, and this has been known in mythology and psychology for a long time. But this research does not add anything new, and forgets to mention the interesting aspects well-known in comparative mythology.
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” - Harry G. Frankfurt
It might also be academic endeavour that is worth doing for its own sake. Everybody works, everybody eats - and some people work doing things like this because all the useful jobs are taken.
Weird, but it's done us proud so far as a species.
What you can't do with linguistics, is infer the existence of stories in the past just because they exist in the present. Language just does not have this kind of data stored.
Let's say 4000 year's ago some guy told a fairy tale about a wolf and someone else wrote it on some kind of paper-like material. Then the people died and the paper got destroyed. At some point the entire culture of this guy disappeared, and only the basic language survived into a new culture. So how do you figure out today that a certain story existed back then? Short answer, you can't. We don't even know that the entire culture existed, let alone a story within that culture.
Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]."
Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact.
They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.
I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.
The Babylonian confusion was common sense for the last 1000-2000 years.
The study is about claiming some specific stories are definitely 6000 years old just because some shady analysis based on nothing but thin air.
Historical linguistics works with non-existent languages. Making assumptions about a non-existent language is one thing, but claiming to know both the time when those languages were spoken and the stories that were told is pure hybris (Lyle Campbell and Paul Heggarty refuse to believe in so-called glossochronology).
The entire field of historical linguistics is pure speculation without any hard evidence. It is impossible to know languages that do not exist anymore or have no written sources.
The Australian linguist Robert Dixon rightfully said that the proponents of far-reaching linguistic affinities undercut the level of what constitutes good science “to the point of nonsense”. He explains that languages can not be reconstructed.
There are thematic similarities between the ancient Indo-European religions. In the Germanic branch, there are the Norns, three female beings responsible for the fates of humanity. There are the three Moirai, the Fates, in Greek mythology. There are the three mothers, also responsible for humanity's fate, in Celtic mythology. Fifteen hundred years later, there are three "weird sisters" in Macbeth.
These cultures shared substantial mythology. Greek mythology c 500 BC and Norse mythology c 800 AD have some two thousand years of separation between the branches, and yet substantial common elements - themes, story elements if you wish - remain. Of course, some degree of exchange was going on the whole time. It's not like these themes were preserved in isolation. The ancients themselves often noticed these connections - and sometimes made connections where there actually weren't any historically, e.g. between Egyptian and Greek gods.
I am reminded of two ancient novels. Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and Lucian's True Story. Both are, essentially, fantasy novels - satirical fantasy novels, highly aware of the existing mythological and fantastical traditions of their time, and they rip them apart.
In the Metamorphoses by Apuleius (a reference to Ovid's very serious treatment of Roman mythology in the also-titled Metamorphoses) the protagonist (spoilers!) very much wishes to become a wizard and gets himself accidentally turned into a sentient donkey - who is promptly sold to a disputable cult leader, and then the comical misfortunes really begin. To the modern eye it's almost impossible to not read it as placing a Roman noble in the body of a beast of burden, but with the soul of a man, and interpreting it as a critique of slavery, while telling funny stories, commenting on Roman beliefs, and indeed, making fun of many of the fantastical themes common at the time. Though if the slavery commentary is really what Apuleius intended is controversial; he may not have seen the irony we see and may have just been having fun.
Lucian's True Story is just completely over the top, it starts with being lost in the Atlantic ocean and washing up on a tropical magical island, and ends with a war with the inhabitants of the Moon.
I bring them up because, having come relatively later to the classics, reading them for the first time as an adult, I remember being constantly surprised with a sense of novelty yet familiarity. Surely these ideas are not so old?
So headlines like this always make me smile a bit.
But still, new evidence is always super interesting.
> While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The "reconstructions" of the authors are based on fantasy. They try to sidestep the massive problem of possible literary origins by manufacturing data with their magical phylogenetic device. It's garbage in, garbage out.
And what they track is not full stories but “tropes” like woman marries magic animal who is really a man under a spell. It it really impossible that this trope could have appeared indepently in mutiple places?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tales>
I had the good fortune to be gifted this as a child. The book itself is a treasure, both verbally and visually (the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich commissioned illustrations specifically for the collection). But the real staying power is returning again and again to the stories, and recognising that these are ... not archetypes, but ... I'm struggling to find the right word, perhaps examplars of a type or class.
This struck me a few years ago as I was re-familiarising myself with Greek and Roman mythology, and as I was reading of Pyramis and Thisbe realised "hey, this is Romeo and Juliet!" Sure enough, that seems to be a fairly well-established connection. And the idea that far older primordial tales have reached us, often through multiple paths and variations, seems highly probable.
There's also the notion of a period in such traditions made their way from oral to written traditions, often in the context of urbanisation and the establishment of empires. This has strong relations to what's called the Axial Age, roughly 800-200 BCE, in which the great cultures of Western (Greek), Indian (Hindu), and Chinese (Confucian), amongst others, theologies and philosophies emerged. Whilst oral traditions can transmit information over generations, it's often lossy and inexact. Writing has as both a strength and curse the property of fixing ideas in a specific representation (though subject to its own agents of change and decay), as famously feared by Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus". The concerns seem quaint to us, largely because we're in the world those influences created. Socrates was speaking from the Before Times. A condition we might apply to ourselves on occasion as well.