Popular fairy tales such as Jack And The Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin could date back thousands of years to prehistoric times, according to academics.
Researchers used a tree of Indo-European languages and phylogenetic analysis, traditionally employed to study evolutionary relationships between species, to trace the stories' origins back in time.
They found that folk tales are not only passed on 'vertically' from ancestral populations to their descendants, but also spread 'horizontally' between societies as a result of trade and conquest.
According to the study's authors, Jack and the Beanstalk originated from a group of stories known as The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure first told 5,000 years during a split in Eastern and Western Indo-European languages.
Analysis suggested Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin are around 4,000 years old and a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil is believed to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked on the study with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from New University of Lisbon, believed the research answered a question about our cultural heritage.
He said: "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.
"Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology - some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts - but our findings suggest they are much older than that."
Data for the study, which was published in Royal Society Open Science journal, was collected from more than 2,000 tale types distributed among more than 200 societies.
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