Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say

[Apech]

Nice article from the BBC website:

 

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.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35358487

 

Our oral tradition goes way back, probably even much older than this article suggests ... relying on the written word we tend to forget just how ancient our heritage is and also how the ideas we have now which might think are quite modern have very deep roots.

 

 

[Marblehead]

Yep.  That's one of the things that caused me to become more of a Materialist than I already was.

[Apech]

Yep.  That's one of the things that caused me to become more of a Materialist than I already was.

 

 

Why?

[Marblehead]

Why?

That's a very good question Apech.

 

Because.  (My mind wasn't ready for that question.)

 

Fairy tales, Myths generally have their roots in something that actually happened at some point in time.  But over the years the root concept has been so embellished that it no longer speaks to the truth of what really happened.  In other words, it becomes nothing but a bit of fiction and the truth has been completely removed.

 

Sure, fairy tales and myths can oftentimes be very useful for presenting a concept in a form that the listener can understand.  Just the myth of Santa Claus is useful because it teaches (or at least used to) that if you are a good boy or girl you will be rewarded by Santa with a nice present.  All religions use this same method.

 

But beware when your government starts using it.

 

Always seek out the facts.  Question everything.

[Jetsun]

Very interesting. Fairy tales and myths are often archetypal, which is why they are universally popular throughout time. The irony being that if something is archetypal in a sense it is more real than than most other "real" written word and story we usually encounter even if it is a complete myth and involves dragons and ogres.

[Nikolai1]

Their method was bogus. Nice idea but this research is bunk.

[Apech]

Their method was bogus. Nice idea but this research is bunk.

 

 

Why do you say that Nickolai?

[Aithrobates]

Genetic tools like neighbour joining have been used by comparative mythologists, and the results published in journals like Bulletin de la Société Mythologie Française, or Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée, for some years now. (See http://nouvellemythologiecomparee.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/01/20/julien-d-huy-polyphemus-aa-th-1137.html which is the translation of the orignal french article in BSMF).

 

And bronze age is nothing... Some myths can be traced back to the paleolithic, even witout those fancy algorythms.

 

Sometimes you find two versions of the same myth on both sides of the Pacific, but neither Inuits nor Aleut know it. As those people were the only two sailing the Pacific, Siberia <-> America, for millemnia, and so the only two who could have carried the myth from Siberia to the Americas (or the other way around), the only possibility is that the myth existed before Bering strait opened, and that the ancestors of the native americans took it whith them.

 

And the strait opened 15 000 BC.

[Nikolai1]

Why do you say that Nickolai?

Because there findings weren't based on textual sources, or even archaeological evidence.  They basically treat theat the myth or story as if it was a biological trait.  So if they myth was found in two disparate cultures, they treated it as if it was a biological trait or behaviour and then 'traced' it back to the common ancestor in which in the putative trait first emerged.  As in biology this requires us to go back many, many generations, they imagine it as the same with the myth.

 

Like I said, it's a nice idea but highly, highly speculative and doesn't take ito account that a good potent myth can spread round the world, by word of mouth, like wildfire.  The same timescales simply aren't required.

Edited January 20, 2016 by Nikolai1

[Aithrobates]

Like I said, it's a nice idea but highly, highly speculative and doesn't take ito account that a good potent myth can spread round the world, by word of mouth, like wildfire.  The same timescales simply aren't required.

 

Comparative mythology is a science, with decads of research. There are ways to evaluate if myths are related, from where a myth came, when, etc... The use of genetic algorithm is not in itself enough. It's just a new tool that is mainly used to verify existing hypothesis. Let's not marvel at this new tech, taken alone it's highly speculative, as you said.

 

One should be aware of the traditional methods, like structural analysis, knowledge of history (hey! Europeans went to America, that would explain the presence of this european myth in some Native tribe !), etc... And of the fact that it is never about reconstructing a proto-myth, but of being aware of as many of its version as possible, to get and idea of what the myth is about. A myth is the sum of all it's version.

[Nungali]

What about mythic themes that seem the same from cultures that had no contact.

 

My classic example is the stars of Scorpius  - Scorpio ....  some stories down here ( and they are direct paleolithic stories, some still extant )  are just too similar in concept to western correlations of Scorpio  to put it down to coincidence .  Also other stories  ( and this dynamic is mentioned in a Wiki article  - I will see if I can find it )   but with these , one can see some reason for a 'coincidence' ... the scorpio story gets me though ....  absolutely no contact between the Greek astrology and peoples ( and its precursors in Zoroastrian, Babylonian or Egyptian astrology / astronomy  ) and the Australian Aboriginals.

 

Unless we are going to postulate an origin of the myth in Africa that eventually ended up in both places ?  That seems a bit of a stretch. 

 

 

 

"  The close resemblance of this to Greek mythology is believed to be coincidental - there is no evidence of any cultural connection. "

 

" it remains an intriguing possibility that aboriginal star knowledge does contain some fragments of a much older original culture. Aboriginal people came to Australia from Asia 50,000 years ago (well before Greek culture formed 3-4,000 years ago), and presumably the Aboriginal people originally came from Africa. While there is no hard evidence of a cultural connection, the possibility should not be written off and the door is open to research to construct models of older human cultures, through the tracing of these narratives and other means such as linguistics." 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy

Edited January 20, 2016 by Nungali

[Nungali]

... And of the fact that it is never about reconstructing a proto-myth, but of being aware of as many of its version as possible, to get and idea of what the myth is about. A myth is the sum of all it's version.

 

 

I think mythic 'motifs' are the key.      The 'full version'  is all possible potentials that can unfold from a set of 'mythic scenarious ' . 

 

Some are inversions, reversals, re structures ....  any version possible, to be able to foresee any possible outcome of events that may occur.

 

For me, this is the essential component  of and use for the 'human soul'  - that imaginative creative capacity that must be expressed . 

 

I see it at the root of physical expression in tool making  and as the prime human differential that separates us from other animals. 

Edited January 20, 2016 by Nungali

[RigdzinTrinley]

Someone heard of Jordan Peterson?

 

I think a psychologist, he also wrote "maps of meaning"

 

Might be of interest to listen to some of his talks on YouTube