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.”
they think they identified the oldest of the bunch, too. i’m not sure they did, really, because back then there was no clear line between storytelling for entertainment, religious mythos, and magic workers’ mysteries. so my educated guess would be that the real oldest fiction-told-as-fiction has probably been filed under mythology or warped into a near-meaningless ritual over the centuries.
you know what would be rad? would be if we could look 6000 years into the future and see which urban myths survived that long. “the lovers discover the killer was outside the whole time” and “the call was coming from inside the house” might be whole folklore categories. 😀
I often think about the memes, gods and saints we leave for the future.
Will someone pass on “GNU Pterry” or “Make Space Mom proud” for long enough to turn it into idioms or myths?
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