New Scientist
Storytelling is a powerful tool deeply rooted in human history. Research shows that myths and folktales, from ancient times to modern days, serve to convey essential survival information, build social bonds, and evoke emotional responses. As stories evolve, they adapt across cultures, preserving universal themes while reflecting local beliefs.
The epic scientific quest to reveal what makes folktales so compelling
Author: Laura Spinney
ONCE upon a time, a strong, attractive hero lost one or both of his parents. He then overcame a series of obstacles and faced off against a monster that had terrorised his community. The hero vanquished the monster and was celebrated.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is the road travelled by Superman, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and countless other fictional heroes stretching back centuries. Its enduring appeal has puzzled researchers for nearly as long. However, in recent years, the study of storytelling has been revitalised, as linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution have begun probing the subject using large databases of myths and folktales, powerful algorithms and an evolutionary mindset. We are finally starting to get answers to key questions, including what makes a good story, why some are more enduring than others and exactly how far back we can trace the roots of the most popular ones – as well as how stories have traversed time and space.
It is an epic quest, but there has never been a better time to undertake it. Unlike the Brothers Grimm and other early folktale collectors, modern surveyors of storytelling needn’t do painstaking fieldwork – they don’t even have to stray from their computer screens to chart the emergence and evolution of stories. “Social media is almost a natural experiment in storytelling that, through its very platform, does the collection,” says folklorist and ethnographer Timothy Tangherlini at the University of California, Berkeley. What’s more, this new scientific approach can illuminate some phenomena that appear to be modern, including the power of conspiracy theories to sometimes lead us down rabbit holes.
The study of myth and folktales has long had a bad reputation, with scholars in generations past trying to co-opt ancient stories as evidence of the march of societies from “primitive” to “civilised” states. Bringing a more data-driven, evolutionary perspective to bear was a breakthrough, not least in providing new ideas about why we tell stories.
One leading hypothesis holds that storytelling emerged as humanity’s first data management system, a way of faithfully and memorably transmitting information that would enhance the recipients’ chances of survival. For anthropologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama at the University of Oregon, this explains why the stories that hunter-gatherers tell are so concerned with the local landscape, climate and animals. “They’re told for their ecological relevance and utility,” she says. As for narrative – the way we structure stories by embedding agents and their actions into a causal sequence – that grew out of a much older aspect of human cognition: the agency-detection mechanism, our tendency to interpret ambiguous cues as evidence of living beings with their own intentions.
But storytelling has traditionally taken place in a group setting, and other researchers have stressed this social aspect. Two decades ago, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford proposed that storytelling is a form of gossip, or “vocal grooming”, that allows people to keep track of who is cooperative and who is a free rider in the community. For Tangherlini, it is a way of building consensus on a world view – the norms and values that the group adheres to. And psychologist Adrian Bangerter at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, sees its purpose as making sense of non-routine events, which also demands consensus, because people must agree on an interpretation. There is evidence that the brain activity of people listening to a story becomes synchronised and that this manifests in feelings of “groupiness”, says Bangerter. A good storyteller encourages these feelings using devices such as re-enactment, reported speech and audience participation, creating a collaborative, immersive experience.
Ghosts and gremlins
As well as helping us understand an exceptional event, storytelling may also anchor the memory of it by keeping the visceral emotion of eyewitnesses alive. One way to enhance memorability is to incorporate elements that are minimally counterintuitive, such as a 100-year flood or a ghost, which violate listeners’ expectations to a small degree. The violation activates our agency-detection mechanism, grabbing attention and raising the heart rate, which then increases neural activity, strengthening the memory. Since it does so across all those in earshot, groupiness is likely to be a by-product. Anyone who regularly goes to a church, mosque or synagogue and listens to stories of the prophets experiences this. “The original protagonists are long gone,” says Bangerter, “but for millions of people, these stories are highly vivid and meaningful.”
These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive: a story might tell us something essential, help us bond and perpetuate the strong emotion of an eyewitness. If it is to stand the test of time, it should also, ideally, be entertaining. Some of the most entertaining, and hence durable, tales share what anthropologist Manvir Singh at the University of California, Davis, calls the sympathetic plot: where a protagonist with a goal and prosocial tendencies meets an obstacle, the removal of which induces joy and feelings of togetherness in the listener. The sympathetic plot isn’t the only narrative structure – others include origin myths and tragedies – but it is found in every human culture. One example is the hero’s journey, Singh’s summary of which opened this piece.
Researchers disagree as to how many basic plots exist. The idea that there are just seven fundamental storylines is itself a popular myth. Nevertheless, large databases now enable them to identify the underlying structure of folktales and compare them with others that share similar elements and themes. One of the best-known databases, started in 1910, is the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index. It is patchy and Eurocentric, but, as with a patchy fossil record, researchers have devised statistical tools for extrapolating from what survives to reconstruct relationships between tales. This approach is helping us answer questions about how the most enduring tales adapt and evolve over time.
The Brothers Grimm, for example, claimed that the stories they collected could be traced back thousands of years to the speakers of Indo-European languages that are ancestral to German. In 2016, literary scholar Sara Graça da Silva at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, and anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at Durham University, UK, tested this claim. Analysing 100 fairy tales told by Indo-European-speaking populations and stored in the ATU Index, they found a strong correlation between the relatedness of stories and the relatedness of the languages in which they were told – providing support for the Grimms’s claim. One tale, about a blacksmith who tricks a devil, cropped up in enough branches of the Indo-European family tree to persuade them that it could have been told by speakers of the last common ancestor of those languages, Proto-Indo-European, in the eastern European steppe about 5000 years ago. “Some folk narratives can be remarkably stable,” says Tehrani.
One rule doesn’t fit all, however. Another study found that similarities between stories told by Arctic forager groups depended less on the relatedness of their languages than on the distance between their communities. The researchers, psychologists Robert Ross, then at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, interpreted this as a clue that stories had diffused between peoples and that borrowing was more likely to happen between close neighbours than between more distant ones. The idea that borrowing has played an important role in shaping stories in the past makes intuitive sense, because stories have generally evolved faster than the languages in which they are told.
Tehrani and his colleagues have shown that there is also a correlation between the relatedness of people and their folktales – but only under about 1000 kilometres. This may reflect the fact that our forebears didn’t generally stray far from their birthplace, and stories were handed down through families. However, in a new study that has yet to be peer-reviewed, they report that some myths can be traced as far back as the early sorties of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, suggesting that people carried these stories long distances. (The blacksmith and the devil could also speak to an unusually long-range migration, and indeed palaeogeneticists have found evidence that the earliest speakers of Indo-European probably did travel far.) Beyond 1000 kilometres, the genetic correlation tends to fall away and geographical proximity comes to dominate – as if borrowing takes over from inheritance. But language and cultural barriers slow the spread of tales and can create striking breaks in the narrative landscape. An analysis by Ross and Atkinson concluded that “folktales from the same culture found 100km apart are, on average, as similar as folktales found 10km apart in different cultures”.
Some myths can be traced as far back as early sorties of Homo sapiens out of Africa
Besides inheritance and borrowing, a third possible mechanism shaping the stories we tell is convergence, meaning that different cultures may gravitate towards the same tales independently, simply because these reflect universal human dilemmas. For instance, five main variations on the Cinderella theme are told around the world, and, in 2023, Tehrani’s group showed that they had been swapping narrative elements for a long time, like interbreeding populations of a single species. At least four of them, however, seem to have arisen in distinct storytelling traditions.
The cultural evolution approach to understanding storytelling has its critics. Tangherlini, for one, points out that while biological inheritance can be traced via genes, there is no equivalent smallest unit for cultural inheritance that can be tracked through time and space. He is sceptical about claims such as one study’s conclusion that Indigenous Australian coastal communities have been telling the same flood myths for at least 7000 years, ever since sea levels rose at the end of the last glacial period – let alone that some stories around today were first told more than 50,000 years ago, in Africa. “Is it really the same story?” he asks. But Tangherlini does accept that groups are conservative when it comes to storytelling. Indigeneous Australians, for instance, insist on stories being told the right way. “Even the Grimms’s old, illiterate woman, who told many of their fairy tales, corrected herself immediately when she had strayed from the canonical version,” says Michael Witzel, a linguist and mythologist at Harvard University.
Ethnographers have long observed small-scale communities policing their storytellers and sanctioning those who get too creative. Nevertheless, individuals can introduce innovations, provided the group deems these to be meaningful, says Tangherlini. Indeed, he believes it is through the tension between the innovating individual and the conservative group that a story evolves. This makes sense to Sugiyama, who has observed that a Native American community might borrow a story from a neighbouring one, adapting it to the local topography and climate. This would then show up as stories becoming more different the further away from the original that they travelled – as Ross and Atkinson found in the Arctic. “One thing that Indigenous knowledge-keepers stress is that the stories are about the land,” she says.
How might these insights apply today in the industrialised world? Nothing has changed, according to Sugiyama, apart from our economies and habitats. Modern stories still speak to place and human psychology, but they also explain our legal, banking, health and political systems to us, and they do so, very often, using the tried-and-tested vehicle of a sympathetic plot. “But instead of reciprocating storytellers by assisting them when they need help, we simply pay them,” she says.
It’s a conspiracy
Storytellers also continue to hijack our agency-detection mechanism for both benevolent and malevolent ends. It may seem like the latter predominates online – much has been written about an “infodemic” of misinformation and disinformation – but, in fact, there is no convincing evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise, and there is some evidence that it has remained stable over time. Admittedly, such beliefs are hard to quantify, and the jury is out as to whether new media have altered the visibility and reach of conspiracy theories, but they have always been with us. Bangerter thinks of them as a type of myth – a story that people believe, in contrast to a folktale, which we know is fiction. They have a lot in common with religious narratives, he says. Stories like the biblical account of the world’s creation explain otherwise inexplicable events, often exaggerating the role of human or human-like agency. Similarly, conspiracy theories, from QAnon to an autism-vaccine link, magnify the role of goal-directed action as opposed to random forces and chance.
Our modern experience also highlights the enduring power of stories. When trust in legitimate authorities is low, someone offering a compelling alternative narrative is more likely to gain followers. “Part of what makes the charisma of a leader is their ability to tell good stories,” says Bangerter. Don’t underestimate the ability of such a leader to drive radical change by resurrecting a dormant story, says Tangherlini. “Stories have enormous impact on people’s real-world behaviour.”
OH NO THEY DIDN’T!
Some of the best-known European folktales were collected by Charles Perrault and brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 17th and 19th centuries respectively. It has always been assumed that they were the first to record stories that had been handed down orally for generations – tales that they then popularised through their writing, including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. In 2009, however, folklorist Ruth Bottigheimer at Stony Brook University in New York suggested that they had pulled off a clever ruse. According to her, they invented these stories, which only entered oral tradition after they had written them down.
Testing that hypothesis, in 2015, Jamie Tehrani at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues compared 23 oral and literary versions of Little Red Riding Hood. They found that the best explanation of the relationships between them was that the story had diversified through multiple retellings long before Perrault ever recorded it. In other words, Bottigheimer’s hypothesis doesn’t stand up, in this case at least – and Tehrani thinks that applies more generally. “The broad consensus is that many folktales are not just early modern inventions,” he says.
Credits: TCA, LLC.