Abstract
Ancient population expansions and dispersals often leave enduring signatures in the cultural traditions of their descendants, as well as in their genes and languages. The international folktale record has long been regarded as a rich context in which to explore these legacies. To date, investigations in this area have been complicated by a lack of historical data and the impact of more recent waves of diffusion. In this study, we introduce new methods for tackling these problems by applying comparative phylogenetic methods and autologistic modelling to analyse the relationships between folktales, population histories and geographical distances in Indo-European-speaking societies. We find strong correlations between the distributions of a number of folktales and phylogenetic, but not spatial, associations among populations that are consistent with vertical processes of cultural inheritance. Moreover, we show that these oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record, and find evidence that one tale (‘The Smith and the Devil’) can be traced back to the Bronze Age. On a broader level, the kinds of stories told in ancestral societies can provide important insights into their culture, furnishing new perspectives on linguistic, genetic and archaeological reconstructions of human prehistory.
Highlights
Recent investigations into the evolution of cultural diversity suggest that relationships among many languages [1,2,3,4], social behaviours [5,6,7] and material culture traditions [8,9,10] often reflect deep patterns of common ancestry that can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years
Wilhelm Grimm argued that the traditional German tales that he and his brother Jacob had compiled were remnants of an ancient Indo-European cultural tradition that stretched from Scandinavia to South Asia: ‘The outermost lines [of common heritage in stories] . . . are coterminous with those of the great race which is commonly called Indo-Germanic, and the relationship draws itself in constantly narrowing circles round the settlements of the Germans . . . It is my belief that the German stories do not belong to the northern and southern parts of our fatherland alone but that they are the absolutely common property of the nearly related Dutch, English and Scandinavians’ [13, p. 576]
An additional set of Bayesian analyses were carried out on tales inferred as being potentially present in the populations’ hypothetical last common ancestor, ‘Proto-Indo-European’. We targeted this node for further investigation for two reasons: firstly, to test the support for the deepest reconstructions suggested by the analyses described above; and secondly, to control for the higher degree of phylogenetic uncertainty toward the root of the Indo-European language tree, which can be more effectively addressed within a Bayesian framework
Summary
Recent investigations into the evolution of cultural diversity suggest that relationships among many languages [1,2,3,4], social behaviours [5,6,7] and material culture traditions [8,9,10] often reflect deep patterns of common ancestry that can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years. Richly documented cultural domain: storytelling [11,12]. Theories concerning possible relationships 2 between storytelling traditions and the descent histories of populations have a long pedigree, and were central to the concerns of pioneering folklorists in the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Grimm argued that the traditional German tales that he and his brother Jacob had compiled were remnants of an ancient Indo-European cultural tradition that stretched from Scandinavia to South Asia: ‘The outermost lines [of common heritage in stories] . Wilhelm Grimm argued that the traditional German tales that he and his brother Jacob had compiled were remnants of an ancient Indo-European cultural tradition that stretched from Scandinavia to South Asia: ‘The outermost lines [of common heritage in stories] . . . are coterminous with those of the great race which is commonly called Indo-Germanic, and the relationship draws itself in constantly narrowing circles round the settlements of the Germans . . . It is my belief that the German stories do not belong to the northern and southern parts of our fatherland alone but that they are the absolutely common property of the nearly related Dutch, English and Scandinavians’ [13, p. 576]
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