- 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.
As much as I want to believe. I have a hard time understanding how they could track back a story without written proof.
From my understanding, linguistically, we know about when languages broke off from each other. When combined with our understanding of human migration, the researchers were able to trace back stories common to different cultures to where it originated. A similar technique has been used to create an idea of what proto-Indo-Eurpoean sounded like. Of course, there is migration of ideas, but I assume the researchers would have accounted for that.I have a hard time understanding how they could track back a story without written proof.
Ok. So that's total bullshit. Let say the devil's Smith story is in early India and in early Europe. They assume it come from when the 2 languages were not separated. You're right, it is more likely to have one story being told to another group. An Indian telling a story to an European. Than to go back when their language was the same. It's even more likely to have 2 people separately coming up with some similar stories in 2 part of the world, than their bullshit common ancestry theory.
For all I know you may be right, but I find it more than a little arrogant to completely discount their research just because, on the face of it, there are other plausible hypotheses. Do you really think that these people only have a single data point to draw from? Obviously, this article doesn't give us the full picture, as it's just a superficial popSci piece. I don't know how deep this research goes, but maybe you could do with giving them some benefit of the doubt.
Keep in mind, I'm grossly oversimplifying it. The linguistics bit is pretty solid, based on common roots and such. And biologically, the migration stuff is really solid. Recent research suggests that pre-modern humans were more mobile than we might suspect, but the 'story movement' idea also has some far fetched necessities. Someone would have to travel really far, hear a story that somehow applies to their life, remember it, travel back, find the story interesting enough to repeat, and then tell the story to enough other people with similar circumstances that the story travels not just in a small region but across an entire continent. The claim is more in regards to the basic structure of the story, not exact details. Honestly, common ancestry sounds better to me. Human oral history is a pretty amazing thing. Homer's tales were oral stories for at least hundreds of years before he wrote them down. Bulgarian storytellers can reach back a similar distance for some stories. Lasting a couple thousand through a much larger population doesn't seem that far fetched to me.So that's total bullshit.
I might be biased because I recently learned about the "paying with sound of money" story (If you read french you can read about it in one of my blog) Its roots are unsure, but around the XVI century we had the same story in Arab, in German and in French: The hero (Nassreddine in Arabs, Till Eulespiegel in German, Joan in French) is hungry. On the market he sit next to someone selling pie (or chicken) and spend the day enjoying the smell. The Merchant ask to be paid, and the hero pay him by making noise with money in his purse. It make more sense to assume the story traveled for one to the other place than to guess it was already known when German/french/Arab was one tongue. My bias is that story travel fast when they are good. My Occam Lightsaber guess a story would have been written by someone, somewhere, before the Grimm Brothers in the XVe, if it was out for 4000 years. But may be the science in the common ancestry theory is sound. I dunno, Linguistic is far out of my reach.