STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW
STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME
STORIES
GUYS LOOK AT THIS
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS
GUYYYYYSSSS
“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.”
How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?
“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”
This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.
For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:
(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering. In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).
Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits. I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.
AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST 