Genetics open a new book to tell a tale of travelling folk stories

Once upon a time, people sat around fires and told stories. What they didn’t know was that these stories would outlive them by millennia, taking on a life of their own. The stories changed and, like a mirror, reflected societies back at themselves. That has been the standard narrative in fairy-tale study over the past 300 years, and it has become rather old. Like a number of academic disciplines, there’s too much solipsistic navel-gazing, too little knowledge-building.

Once upon a time, in a previous life, this humble columnist embarked upon an ill-fated postgraduate foray into the study of fairy tales, and learnt an important lesson: sometimes quitting is the best choice.

My problem was the only people who would read my thesis were my supervisor, my mother and, possibly — if I was lucky — the person I was dating.

Blue-sky research is fundamental to building our knowledge as a society, but staring at a single stitch without connecting it to a larger tapestry is a waste. That’s what makes a recent piece of research — published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — different: it melds the very humanities-focused study of fairy tales with the latest in genetic population data. Researchers mapped folk tales to the DNA of the people who tell them to investigate how these stories spread across the earth.

This speaks to a broader question: how do stories travel? They travel best by word of mouth, apparently, if the distance is greater than 4,000km. If the distance is less, human migration plays a greater role.

The researchers looked at 596 folk tales and mapped them to the genetics of 33 population groups for whom whole DNA sequences were available. There has been a move to map cultural transmission to human evolution, and this is the latest development in that type of research. The theory goes like this: there are two main ways for cultural information to move, diffusion or migration (or a hybrid of the two). With migration, people move and take their stories with them.

Diffusion involves one person telling the story to another, and it moves across the world like a chain.

Surprisingly — and this might have something to do with the morphology of fairy tales, which appears to speak to the human psyche — the story doesn’t get as mangled as you’d think.

Language was the major impediment to the spread of cultural information.

This sort of research is like a secret door opening and letting fresh air into a stuffy room.

There’s a recent analogy in SA. In 2017, researchers found a way to date Southern African rock art, having found that the black paint — contrary to popular belief — does contain carbon.

While we have one of the richest caches of rock art in the world, we have very few dates. For some reason, the hard sciences seemed to pass the discipline by. Most of the research has been on the ethnographic meaning of the art. That’s important, but after a few decades of that, you need to start looking for those hidden doors to bring in new air.

Amazingly, the reason we have so few dates was based on an incorrect assumption. To apply carbon dating to rock art, there needs to be carbon in the paint. In European rock art, the thick slabs of organic black paint (made from charcoal or animal fat) meant that researchers could date the art. In SA, researchers assumed our art’s black was predominantly made of manganese, not organic carbon. By infusing a little hard science into what was traditionally an isolated, self-contained tower, researchers have changed the discipline. Stories need science too.

THERE HAS BEEN A MOVE TO MAP CULTURAL TRANSMISSION TO HUMAN EVOLUTION, AND THIS IS THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT