The family tree of folk tales

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories.  They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.

The stories center on the wise and humorous character of Ōoka Tadasuke, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases.  In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered tempura shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.

Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid.  The tempura shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.

"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile.  "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."

The whole collection is an absolute delight.  Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.

A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]

Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time.  And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart.  Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).

How long have we been telling our invented tales, though?  The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E.  But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go?  And how could we be at all sure?

A new study by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which.  Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.

There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a molecular clock -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate.  The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the longer ago that common ancestor lived.

De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out.  As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics.  And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.

In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising.  The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world.  I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the loup-garou and feu follet and les lutins that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it).  That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.

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The evolution of Little Red Riding Hood

Every once in a while, I'll run across a piece of scientific research that is so creative and clever that it just warms my heart, and I felt this way yesterday when I stumbled onto a link to the article in PLoS ONE called "The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood," by Jamshid Tehrani of the University of Bristol.

The reason I was delighted by Tehrani's paper is that it combines two subjects I love -- evolutionary biology and mythology and folklore.  The gist of what Tehrani did is to use a technique most commonly used to assemble species into "star diagrams" -- cladistic bootstrap analysis -- to analyze worldwide versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story to see to what degree a version in (for example) Senegal was related to one in Germany.

Cladistic bootstrap analysis generates something called a "star diagram" -- not, generally, a pedigree or family tree, because we don't know the exact identity of the common ancestor to all of the members of the tree, all we can tell is how closely related current individuals are.  Think, for example, of what it would look like if you assembled the living members of your family group this way -- you'd see clusters of close relatives linked together (you, your siblings, and your first cousins, for example) -- and further away would be other clusters, made up of more distant relatives grouped with their near family members.

So Tehrani did this with the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, by looking at the similarities and differences, from subtle to major, between the way the tale is told in different locations.  Apparently there are versions of it all over the world -- not only the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales variety (the one I know the best), but from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan.  Oral transmission of stories is much like biological evolution; there are mutations (people change the story by misremembering it, dropping some pieces, embellishment, and so on) and there is selection (the best versions, told by the best storytellers, are more likely to be passed on).  And thus, the whole thing unfolds like an evolutionary lineage.

In Tehrani's analysis, he found three big branches -- the African branch (where the story is usually called "The Wolf and the Kids"), the East Asian branch ("Tiger Grandmother"), and the European/Middle Eastern Branch ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Catterinella," and "The Story of Grandmother").  (For the main differences in the different branches, which are fascinating but too long to be quoted here in full, check out the link to Tehrani's paper.)

Put all together, Tehrani came up with the following cladogram:

WK = "The Wolf and the Kids," TG = "Tiger Grandmother," "Catt" = "Catterinella," GM = "The Story of Grandmother," and RH = "Little Red Riding Hood;" the others are less common variations that Tehrani was able to place on his star diagram.

The whole thing just makes me very, very happy, and leaves me smiling with my big, sharp, wolflike teeth.

Pure research has been criticized by some as being pointless, and this is a stance that I absolutely abhor.  There is a completely practical reason to support, fund, and otherwise encourage pure research -- and that is, we have no idea yet what application some technique or discovery might have in the future.  A great deal of highly useful, human-centered science has been uncovered by scientists playing around in their labs with no other immediate goal than to study some small bit of the universe.  Further, the mere application of raw creativity to a problem -- using the tools of cladistics, say, to analyze a folk tale -- can act as an impetus to other minds, elsewhere, encouraging them to approach the problems we face in novel ways.

But I think it's more than that.  The fundamental truth here is that human mind needs to be exercised.  The "what good is it?" attitude is not only anti-science, it is anti-intellectual.  It devalues inquiry, curiosity, and creativity.  It asks the question "how does this benefit humanity?" in such a way as to imply that the sheer joy of comprehending deeply the world around us is not a benefit in and of itself.

It may be that Tehrani's jewel of a paper will have no lasting impact on humanity as a whole.  I'm perfectly okay with that, and I suspect Tehrani would be, as well.  We need to make our brains buckle down to the "important stuff," yes; but we also need to let them out to play sometimes, a lesson that the men and women currently overseeing our educational system need to learn.  In a quote that seems unusually apt, considering the subject of Tehrani's research, Albert Einstein said: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world."