Speaking of evolution, it turns out that many common fairy tales are older than originally thought.
Dr Jamie Tehrani has studied “35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood” and has been tracking them back to their origin. Previously thought to have originated in France, it turns out the story has variants around the globe. In Iran the fictional girl on her way to see her grandmother is a boy, and in China the wolf who harasses her is a tiger.
The researchers have “adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor,” grouping stories into “distinct families according to how they evolved over time.”
The oldest ancestor Tehrani’s found for Little Red? “An Aesopic fable that dated from about the sixth century BC…”
