m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

I probably tweeted this back when it came out, but here, via a mailing list I’m trying to catch up on, is the Telegraph’s story on folktales:

A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.

The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.