Fairy tales much older than previously thought: study

Fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years, with some stories even having prehistoric roots, a new study has found.
Researchers from Durham University in UK and New University of Lisbon in Portugal studied links between stories from around the world and found that some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age.
The stories had been thought to date back to the 16th and 17th Centuries.
The findings showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin are about 4,000 years old.
A folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age, 'BBC News' reported.

"Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure. It could could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago," said Jamie Tehrani from Durham University.

"We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language," he added.
The study used a 'tree' of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time.

Researchers employed phylogenetic methods to investigate the relationships between population histories and cultural phenomena, such as languages, marriage practices, political institutions, material culture and music.
The findings were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science journal.