Phylogenetic Analysis of Fairy Tales

Jamie Tehrani (Jamshid Tehrani), Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, pioneered the application of biological phylogenetic analysis methods to the study of fairy tale transmission across cultures. His landmark 2013 paper 'The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood' (published in PLOS ONE) analyzed 58 folktale variants using cladistic, Bayesian, and phylogenetic network methods with 72 plot variables. Key findings: ATU 333 (Little Red Riding Hood) and ATU 123 (The Wolf and the Seven Goats) are genuinely distinct international tale types, not artificial categories imposed by folklorists. African tales cluster as ATU 123 variants, while East Asian tales blend elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. In 2016, Tehrani co-authored (with Sara Graca da Silva) a broader study published in *Royal Society Open Science* that traced some Indo-European folktales back to the Bronze Age using language phylogenies — suggesting tales like 'The Smith and the Devil' may be 6,000+ years old. This approach treats folktales like biological species: they have shared ancestors, they mutate as they spread, and they can be mapped onto evolutionary trees. The method provides empirical evidence for relationships between tale variants that folklorists previously debated based on subjective similarity.