Other people have insisted that 'Little Red Riding Hood' has ancient origins. It's been suggested that the tale was an invention of Charles Perrault, who wrote it down in the 17th century. What are some of the theories about the origins of 'Little Red Riding Hood'? You can figure out which features of a related group of organisms or folktales could be traced back to a common ancestor. The descendants of ancestral species will resemble them in certain ways. What you do with phylogenetics is you reconstruct history by inferring the past that's been preserved through inheritance. You used a methodology called phylogenetics. We need to use some kind of method for reconstructing that history in the absence of physical evidence. Similarly, folktales are only very occasionally written down. We have little evidence about the evolution of species because the fossil record is so patchy. In many ways the problem of reconstructing folklore tradition is very similar to the problem of reconstructing the evolutionary relationship of species. They get told and retold with slight alterations, and then that gets passed on to the next generation and gets altered again. Why did you think that a scientific method might work to determine the evolution of folk tales?įolktales are like biological species: They literally evolve by descent with modification. National Geographic spoke with Tehrani about his hunt for the origins of this famous story.

In a paper published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, he argues that methods used to track the evolution of biological species can be applied to the evolution of folktales. Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, thinks he's found the answer. Where did the original story come from? Scholars have been puzzling over that for years. In East Asia, the predator is more likely to be a big cat. In Africa, the villain could be a fox or a hyena. What happens next depends on which version you hear: Was Little Red Riding Hood devoured? Did a passing huntsman cut her from the wolf's belly? Did she trick the wolf into letting her go outside? In parts of Iran, the child in peril is a boy, because little girls wouldn't wander out on their own. Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandmother, only to discover that a wolf has eaten the old lady, dressed in her clothes, and now plans to eat the little girl too.

Red riding hood by charles perrault