The Ancients - Origins of Mythology

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

From Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast, the roots of fairy tales stretch back thousands of years — to the dawn of Indo-European languages and beyond.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by author and journalist Laura Spinney to explore the origins of mythology. From the tales compiles by the Brothers Grimm to cutting-edge linguistic studies, they explore how ancient myths endure across cultures, and what they reveal about human societies stretching back tens of thousands of years.MOREThe Birth of Indo-European With thanks to the authors of the Proto-Indo European reconstructions Ricardo Ginevra (Assistant Professor of Historical and General Linguistics, Catholic University of Milan) and Andrew Byrd (Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Kentucky). Reconstructions performed by Phil Barnett (MA in Linguistics, University of Kentucky).Click on the following links to listen to the full reconstructions on Youtube:Creation MythDragon-Slaying MythPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Astall and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello all. Welcome to today's episode of the ancients. You'll have to forgive my slightly hoarse voice. I have recovered. Maybe I was being a bit too optimistic last time. I'm still feeling a little under the weather. Still got quite a horse voice. But hey, happens once in a while. The weather's getting colder. The summer has ended here and it's time to put on the jumpers and jackets again in the UK. So hey, I guess you could say it was bound to happen. Anyway, enough about me and more about today's episode. Really excited to share this one with you because you might remember a few months ago back in April, I believe. We released an episode about the birth of Indo-European languages, proto-Indo-European, a linguistics episode, and you guys went mad for it. It was amazing to see

how many responses we got to the episode, how much you loved our guest, Laura Spinney, and how much you were clamouring for more episodes on ancient linguistics. So I'm delighted to say that we are responding to that today with our episode. We've got Laura Spinney back on the show and she's talking us through the amazing new research into the origins of mythology and how these stories go back thousands of years. I've got a hunch. This one's going to be popular. Anyway, that's enough from me. Let's go. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rumpel Stiltskin, Beauty and the Beast, all well-known fairy tales today.

But what have I told you that the origins of these stories stretch back thousands of years, to the birth of Indo-European languages, and probably even earlier? This was an idea first put forward two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm, And now, linguistic studies are starting to back up their theory. Today, we are starting to get more of an idea about how the earliest stories humans ever created were structured, and how omnipresent some of them are, persisting for tens of thousands of years right up to the present day. This is the fascinating story of the origins of mythology, with our guest, Laura Spinney.

Laura, welcome back. It's great to have you back on the podcast. It's lovely to be back. Now, when we have you on, it's always like linguistics and going back thousands of years. We talked about proto-Indo-European last time. The topic we're tackling today, is this the origins of mythology? Is this the origins of mythology? We're trying to get as close to it as possible. I mean, I think probably human beings have told stories for as long as they've spoken. Let's put it that way. But there's a big debate over when they started speaking. But yes, we're getting back to, for example, stories as old as the first migrations out of Africa, 60,000 years ago. So we're going back a very long way.

And with myths and legends, which we're going to be talking about in depth today, why do you think humans have always told stories like this? Well, that is a huge and naughty question in itself. Sorry. Sorry one to start off with. It's huge, and it's very, very exciting in a way. why do we do it? Why can we almost not help ourselves doing it? I mean, you could see conspiracy theories which people are so concerned with today as a form of storytelling. You know, there are lots of theories and in fact this new way of thinking about storytelling, which is the reason we're talking about it

today, is throwing out lots of new ideas about why we tell stories because it's showing how enduring certain types of stories are or certain elements of stories are. And that is leading to new thinking about why stories persist. You know, if these elements, for example, survival information are always there, then that might be why we tell stories in order to convey that information, for example. Because survival information, does that show that there's a practical function of storytelling in ancient societies? It's not just gathering around to tell a story for people to go to sleep. There is actual important knowledge, do we think, that was kept within these stories,

especially when we go back thousands of years. Right. That's the leading theory. So, for example, if you look at some of the stories that are told by hunter-gatherer people, small-scale societies, both modern and in history, they're very anchored in the landscape and where those people live. They're very anchored in the flora and fauna of those places. So maybe they're telling something about animals to look out for plants, not to eat, so to speak. But that's not the only theory. There's many other theories. And of course, stories could be doing many different things at once. Can it also be the case sometimes with stories?

I appreciate this is probably isn't the case all the time. But could they also have a purpose of keeping distant memories alive. So maybe an event that happened thousands of years ago, but it's kind of faded into myth and has been embellished over time. But can storytelling also aim to try and keep a big event of the ancestors of their people alive? In my mind, I divide the kind of different theories about why we tell stories into two main blocks. One is about conveying information, right, that very practical thing. And the other school of thought is that it has to do with keeping us together as a society, if you like. I mean, if you think about how stories were told in ancient times. You know, the bard stands up and performs orally in front

of a crowd. So it's something that has always been embedded in a social context. And so maybe it brings us together. Maybe it creates a sense of identity, a sense of solidarity or empathy. A really good storyteller, after all, is somebody who brings his audience in and gets them to feel all the same emotions. And there have even been sort of brain imaging studies which show that people who are listening to a really good storyteller have the same sort of synchronized activity. So that might feed into your idea about memories, right? That it's a way of anchoring memories in a group of people of, for example, something that doesn't happen very often, but that when it does happen is dramatic, like say a hundred year flood or a pandemic. Yes, the flood idea.

Exactly. So people might not live through such a thing in their own lifetimes, but they need to know there's a risk there. I'd also like to ask at the beginning the type of myth known as the hero's journey that you see repeated again and again down to the present day. Why do you think this type of format, it has resonated so strongly across cultures and over so many centuries and indeed millennia? It's a really good question. So I think, you know, heroes' journeys of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, but you can think of other types of heroes, Harry Potter as one. You know, this is just such a basic type of story that we tell. And of course, there is this idea of story archetypes, this idea of seven basic plots of which the hero's journey would be one. And I think

that, you know, people are very aware of that idea, even though experts today would probably be a little bit more skeptical of that idea of story archetypes. So, you know, stories are very fluid. And even if you can identify basic elements that get transmitted over time, they're always being mixed and matched and the building blocks are being swapped around. So, you know, the idea of basic stories is something that most experts are skeptical of. Having said that, there are obviously basic human dilemmas, which we all need to be aware of and understand and that we're familiar with and that we talk about. And the hero's journey, this idea that, you know, the hero goes on a quest, overcome some major obstacle, maybe meets a monster and kills it, and then gets

the ultimate goal, whether that goal is the girl or the stardom or the spaceship is very fundamental to the stories we tell. And so what are the other key story archetypes that we have? The idea of seven basic plots is a little bit of an urban myth. I suppose it goes back to a book about 20 years old and now written by Christopher Booker where he talked about these seven basic story types. One is overcoming the monster. Another is rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, and then he adds in rebirth, tragedy and comedy, I think. In some ways, this is picking up on earlier ideas, because one of those is kind of a hero's journey. There are these sort of, you know, seven basic platforms is what he was talking about. And I think experts are dubious about this,

but other ideas which are shared across storytelling traditions and that reflects universal human experiences for sure. Now let's get into the fun, I guess, science-y, linguistic stuff in understanding how you tackle how far back these stories can go, Laura. I mean, how do you go about doing that? How can people today look at stories and look at similarities between certain myths and legends over centuries and start tracking them back thousands of years?

Yeah, okay. So it all does start with linguistics in a way. Many of the people who study myths and try to understand where they come from are linguists by training. And so they are very often the same people who try to understand where our languages come from and where they evolved. And there is some evidence that languages and stories can, at least in certain contexts, evolve and move together. So it comes down to this new way of thinking about stories in a sort of evolution, way. And to think about them this way has been made possible because now we have computers, we have the internet, we have huge databases of myths and legends and folk tales which allow us

to compare them and to compare them across, you know, very widely spaced cultures in time and in the world geographically. And so what it boils down to something called the comparative method. You basically take the features of whether it be a language or a myth and you compare them across cultures in order to understand how they may be related in those cultures and how they might have evolved from an earlier form, a common ancestor, perhaps. So in languages, I've just written about the Indo-European language family, and we talk about how the 400 or so living Indo-European languages and many that have died can all be traced back to this parent language we call proto-Indo-European

that was probably spoken in Eastern Europe on the steps around 5,000 years ago. Likewise, with myths, you can compare the basic elements of myths. We called the smallest unit rather like a gene in by. in a myth, it would be a myth theme. So a mytheme might be something like a great flood or a thunderbolt wielding God. And you can look for those elements, those units across storytelling traditions. And when you find them with related elements, then you can start to work out if they came from a common source and then even reconstruct that source. It is trickier than the same sort of exercise in biology because, for example, maybe we have the same

element of a myth in different cultures because it's just a universal human experience. I don't know, maybe we've all in our history has got a great flood. It might not have been inherited, it might have been borrowed, or we might just have converged on it by chance, so to speak. So you have to disentangle those different effects, but there are ways of doing that. And that's how these linguists and mythologists have managed to trace some stories back very, very far indeed. I mean, brilliantly explained. Can we use an example to kind of also highlight what you've mentioned there, Laura, and especially, I've got in my notes, first of all, the Smith and the Devil story, and how that potentially can link to what you've already mentioned earlier,

that going all the way back thousands of years to that almost mother language, proto-Indo-European. Yeah. So the Smith and the Devil, the way that these sort of basic story types are named in the databases, first of all, you might not recognize a story called Smith and the Devil, but it's sort of like the name given to the ancestral form. So for example, a version of that story that we might be familiar with would be Faust. At least it influenced the many different tellings of Faust. So it's this idea of somebody who makes a pact with the devil, perhaps in exchange for some kind of superpower or special knowledge.

You know, in the most commonly known versions of Faust, he makes a pact with the devil where he gives up his soul in exchange for worldly riches and supernatural knowledge. So the idea is there are researchers. The main person here would be Jamie Tehrani, who's an anthropologist at the University of Durham. And they've applied this, what I've described as the phylogenetic approach to myths, comparing these elements and, you know, working out how they are related to each other and how they might have evolved to various myths that are told in Indo-European traditions.

And they've worked out that this particular one is particularly old. The Smith and the devil might go back all the way, perhaps five or six thousand years to when the first Indo-European speakers came into Europe from the step. They undertook these huge journeys coming west. Their languages will give rise to many of the Indo-Europeans languages spoken in Europe today, so Germanic, including English, romance, Celtic languages, Baltic, Slavic and many others, Greek, for example. And the stories may have come with those languages. And interestingly, the Brothers Grimm, who, you know, documented some of these languages

in the sort of backwards of Germany in the 19th century, they suspected that they had come with the languages. And now here are these new techniques being applied. to, you know, prove it in some sense. So you have similarities between the brothers Grimm and their collection of fairy tale stories and research doing today. That's incredible.

An interesting thing about the Grim brothers is that they went collecting stories in the forests, in the kind of rural villages. Basically, what they wanted to do was to collect material in different German dialects that would then allow them to reconstruct the proto-Germanic language. So the kind of initial Germanic language

that gave rise to all the others, including now today we have Dutch, German, English. These are all Germanic languages and the Scandinavian languages are in there too. They wanted to compare those dialects and sort of collecting the folk stories that were told in those dialects was a sort of just a side effect for them, a byproduct. But of course, that's what we know best of them today. The stories that they collected and wrote down, in many cases for the first time, and that we are still telling to our children and that are being turned into Disney films, etc. Some of those stories now, again, with techniques that people like

Jamie Tarani are applying, are turning out to be extremely old. So the Smith and the Devil is the oldest one they found in the Indo-European tradition. But they've also suggested that things like Rumpel Stiltskin or Beauty and the Beast might be 4,000 years old, might have been told by some of the earliest Indo-Europeans speakers in Europe, if not the very first. So to clarify, if we did go back thousands of years to one of these early Indo-European groups, and let's say we could understand their language, gathered around a fire, and hear them telling this story.

Would it be the case that we would be able to recognize, you know, kind of key elements of that story, you know, the devil and the smith? Of course, it wouldn't be exactly the same as stories we know today, but it's just those key core elements of the myth that we would be able to recognize and see the clear similarities. Exactly. And it would probably be quite a strange experience because you would recognize elements, but you wouldn't really, you know, they'd be put together in an odd way or there'd be other elements that you didn't recognize and things you were expecting to hear about that you didn't. So, you know, things missing, things added and so on. Yes, that's exactly right. And it's the same thing. In fact, when you hear, for example, reconstructed proto-Indo-European language spoken,

because, of course, this was a language spoken 5,000 years ago before writing, it was never written down. And yet linguists have reconstructed what they think it sounded like. And when you hear it, sometimes it sounds extremely foreign and you definitely won't understand it. But at the same time, there are things which jump out at you, which sound familiar. And it would have been a bit like that with the stories as well.

And just as linguists have been able to reconstruct certain parts of Indo-European, have they then also been able to reconstruct, I mean, almost longer passages of certain myths. You mentioned the devil and the smith, but I've got a couple of other key ones as well. And so we can almost hear parts of those stories today. Absolutely. So, for example, they did one deep dive, the same group, Jamie Tarani and his colleagues, into Cinderella, the story of Cinderella, the Rags to Rich's story. You know, Joseph Campbell was counted as one of his sort of seven archetypes. And to cut a long story short,

basically their conclusion was that the Cinderella notion, this rags to riches notion, had probably arisen independently in at least four storytelling traditions around the world. But since then, in the last few thousand years, those different traditions, because people move around and people meet and people share stories,

have been swapping elements between themselves. Right. So here we have a case where it's a kind of universal idea. you know, we all love the Ragster Richards idea and it might have been something that we were all familiar with in ancient times that this could happen to people in our midst. So we tell stories about such people, but those stories have always also borrowed elements from each other.

So maybe one has a particular scintillating feature to it and that gets borrowed by other ones and they've been having story sex in this way for hundreds of years. But initially the Cinderella story might have arisen, you know, independently in different traditions. I love how the story of Cinderella, and you mentioned earlier, Rumble Stiltskin, might have its origins thousands of years ago. And I'm delighted to say that we do have a couple

of reconstructions of stories with us today to share a view, our listeners. Yeah, so this is a linguist called Ricardo Geneva, who's based in Milan, and Andrew Bird, who is at the University of Kentucky in the United States. And they have painstakingly reconstructed these two myths, the Dragon Slayer myth and the creation of the world myth, that would have been told in their estimation by the first into European speakers, but they've reconstructed them also in the proto-Indo-European language. And Phil Barnett has performed them, and I think we're going to hear them now. We absolutely are. So let's start with the first one, the creation myth. I remember it when nothing was.

earth was not dewbram water is earth was not nor heaven above deep water was not nor flowing waters life was not nor indescapable death sun was not nor moon in the sky no stars nor night nor day there was only a void and nothing else someone in the void existed

a person him the gods killed and cut into pieces from his head they made the sky from his flesh the earth from his bones the rocks and from his blood the deep water from his eyes the sun and moon and moon. Who was this person? Did it exist alone or was it a twin? From where was it born? No God

knows this. The king of the gods, father of gods and men, surely knows this. Or does he not know? So there was Phil Barnett with the creation myth. I mean, Laura, talk to us about this myth and what we know. So basically every human culture that we know of has a creation myth. They have their story that explains to them how the world came to be. And the first Indo-European speakers were no different, but their story has certain distinguishing features, let's say. For example, in the Indo-European creation myth, the first man makes the world from the dismembered parts of his twin, his twin brother.

So there's this notion of brotherhood. and in fact twins, which runs through all descendant Indo-European mythologies. It's there in Celtic tradition, it's there in the Germanic tradition, there's there in the Italic tradition. Think of Romulus and Remus, who founders of Rome. And it's also there in the Asian branches of the Indo-European family. So in the languages that are descended from Sanskrit, for example, or in the Persian tradition. So this is a reconstruction of the first version of that myth, if you like, and told, as I said, in the first Indo-European language.

which is, I find, I mean, it sends shivers down my spine to hear it. It's astonishing. It's astonishing to hear that. And once again, it heralds back to our last chat as well about how clever these linguists are today, that they're not only able to reconstruct the myths, but also the language in which they would have been spoken. And it's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. And it's become more and more scientific over the last, let's say, 80 years, let's say roughly since World War II. It's still, to some extent, an art. I mean, you know, there's a lot of disagreement about what it might have sounded like, what the story, what exact form the story would have taken. But I think that, you know, the ability,

the concept that we have the ability to reconstruct those long dead languages and the myths that those people told is accepted. It is possible to do it. And that you can come up with something that vaguely resembles what people talked about then. So, Laura, is it fair to say that if an ancient culture had a creation myth that featured two brothers, or there is two key brothers in groups of mythology that feature again and again, is it very likely that the culture is Indo-European and that these stories may well originate with the one we've just talked about with Proto-European thousands of years ago? It's a red flag. It's a big clue. Then what you have to do is you have to eliminate

the other possibilities. So you have to eliminate the possibility that, for example, people started telling a story about brothers by chance, no relationship to the Indo-European languages, or that they borrowed it from Indo-European speakers. So you have to eliminate those things, but there are ways you can do that. So, for example, now we are learning a great deal. This is a hugely dynamic field at the moment about prehistoric migrations. We have this amazing tool called ancient DNA, which I know that you know a lot about,

but for the last 20 years we've been able to extract DNA from ancient human remains and analyze it, and that means that we can say a lot more than we used to be able to about how prehistoric people moved around the world. And since we know that when people move, they carry their languages and their stories with them, at least for a while, this is another kind of, if you like, an independent source of information that helps us to know if those stories were genuinely brought with the first speakers of the languages or if they somehow got inherited later on by a different route. So we know, for example, that the first Indo-European speakers came into Europe or that people at the time that those languages arrived came into Europe in large numbers. So it seems at least possible that they brought their stories with them. Well, let's go on to the second story now before we explore a bit more about that kind of traveling element of this, which is also really important.

But the second myth that we do have reconstructed is the dragon slaying myth. Right. So this is the idea of some terrible, ghastly, horrible monster that is, in its most basic form, keeping something vital from humans. You know, usually in the oldest versions of the tale, it was water, but it might have been maidens. in some version, or cattle. And the hero has to slay the monster and release the vital thing back to humans. And very often, at least in Indo-European versions of the story,

the hero himself, that's usually a hymn, dies not long after slaying the monster and saving his people. And there is this notion that runs through all the Indo-European traditions of immortal fame. There's even the words for it which you can trace across the different, linguistic traditions, that, you know, the greatest glory was to be had in dying on the battlefield. And so you have that element too, which of course was inherited in the story of Sikh Fried or as Fandier in the Persian traditions or in the Homeric traditions, this idea of people dying

for eternal glory. Well, let's have a listen to it in the original language. I remember him, the undefeated language. I remember him, the undefeated thunderer. Heos kietrums der Houti. Hume, but whose deegon berit. He who defeats enemies, he the broad earth bore, he killed the serpent. A son was born for farther sky and broad earth, thunderer by name.

He drinks me. with the immortal gods. He has protected men and livestock, the two-footed and forfeited. He killed the serpent. A serpent was born in the water, in the depths, in the darkness. At first, the serpent overcame the thunderer and the immortal gods. He killed men and livestock, the two-footed and four-fitted. The thunderer escaped and received the hammer from the fashioner.

From the fashioner, he killed the serpent. Hegway, hoggim. So, Laura, as you mentioned before we heard that, you can see similarities with some of the biggest mythological stories of ancient Greece, can't you? Because again and again, you get those heroes going out to fight this dreaded monster, saving a community and so on. So that's just one example.

But as you've highlighted earlier, that story of the hero going out to slay the beast and some sort of reward, you know, it's still as popular as ever today. It is absolutely still as popular as ever today. If you think about the children's book, How to Train Your Dragon, which has just been turned into a film this year. But, you know, you could mention so many others. There's Tolkien, there's Game of Thrones, etc., we can't get enough of dragons. You know, it's even into modern Argo with people talking about you slayed me. The language is there, even if its meaning is changing slightly or evolving,

which is perfectly, you know, normal. That's what happens with language. But also this dragon slayer story illustrates another theme in what we've been talking about, which is that the concept of a dragon is not exclusive to Indo-European traditions, nor is the dragon slayer either. I mean, you can find it, for example, in sub-Saharan cultures or in China, these stories are told. But there are features of the way that story is told in Indo-European cultures that define it very much as Indo-European.

So it's very painstaking the word linguists and mythologists do in trying to make sure that the story they're focused on really does belong to that tradition and isn't more widely shared. So there is an idea, for example, that perhaps the dragon's tale has even older roots, that it might have come out of Africa and that people when they first migrated, you know, 60,000 years ago and people, the rest of the world, that they took this concept of a dangerous reptile with them because, of course, there were dangerous snakes in Africa. And we know that there are stories told in parts of the world that don't even have snakes. For example, in cold Alaska where there are no snakes. They tell about a great sea monster called a Palayyuk. So is that an idea that came out of Africa? It's mind-blowing to think it might have been. But maybe before you say that, you have to eliminate the possibility that, for example,

the Alaskans borrowed that tale from, say, some Indo-European speaking culture or another one. You have to eliminate the possibility that was borrowed rather than inherited. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. One of my favourite artefacts from the Ice Age, I believe there's now a bit of a debate about the date,

but it's always put about 40 to 35,000 years ago, is this upright lion, the Lervynmensch, also known as Lion Man, which is like a lion, but anthropomorphic in its state. So it's a human, but with the head of a lion, body of a lion. So it's clearly a mythical creature. So do you think, if you've got evidence like that as well, that, you know, people from tens of thousands of years ago, some of the earliest stories, earliest mythology,

the inclusion of strange creatures of mythical creatures combined with, you know, ferocious animals they saw in the environment like mountain lions, cave lions and so on, were a key part of their mythology right from the get-go? Absolutely. So, for example, in the... the Black Sea region, which is where the Indo-European language was probably spoken, we know that there were still lions prowling and all sorts of other dangerous animals,

including wild cows called Orocks, those ones with the Great Big Curved Horns, for example. So they saw these animals, or they had recent memories, you know, handed down of these animals. And they also had people at that time, hunter-gathering, people in general, they live in a kind of spirit world, and they're surrounded by animals which themselves are invested with spiritual lives. So, you know, the line between animals and people in terms of spirit lives was much more blurred. So I think the idea that, you know,

using animals and humans was not at all foreign to them. Then the story traditions would have incorporated those creatures and would have been handed down orally over generations. So, yeah, it's really not that surprising at all, given what we know about those people's beliefs and how they live. Going back to what you mentioned earlier, this idea that, you know, people traveled back in ancient history and these ancient and prehistoric migrations and that they would have brought their stories and beliefs with them. But how do we see certain stories change and evolve as people came into contact with new groups of people? Yeah, I mean, they change and evolve all the time.

They take elements from each other from other people's stories. For example, there's some evidence that, you know, amongst Hunter Gathering, people I mentioned earlier that these stories are very often very anchored in the landscape that is inhabited by the people who tell them, right? So they contain a lot of useful information potentially about the natural environment. But as those stories get borrowed further and further afield, they adapt to describe the new topography or the new climate in the new place or the new plants and animal life. So, you know, that would be evidence you might think for this idea of stories is transferring survival information.

And, you know, we do know that, for example, take Little Red Riding Hood, one of the stories that Charles Perra first wrote down in the 17th century of Frenchmen, so 100 years or so before the Grim brothers came along in Germany. There was a suspicion, for example, for a while, that he might have been guilty of some kind of clever ruse,

and actually he made up the story, and only then did it enter oral culture. But work like that of Jamie Tehrani, where they compare the different oral versions that are told around the world, shows that there's huge diversity and that diversity probably comes from a story having been handed down through generations for a very long time before Pevel wrote it down. So it does speak to this older idea that these are stories that have a long oral tradition. And if you think

about Little Red Riding Hood, I mean, there is one idea that it's a cautionary tale, right? You have a little girl who's wearing her red cloak, which symbolizes menstruation, you know, reaching puberty. She goes astray in the forest and encounters the big bad wolf. And it's a cautionary tale about not going with strangers. Now, we haven't traced that story back right to the beginning of the Indo-European influence on Europe. But it's interesting that from the other side, from the archaeological domain, people are beginning to understand what the arrival of Indo-European speakers in Europe would have looked like and that it might have been, at least in some places spearheaded by young war bands, groups of young roving warriors, who themselves had a

wolf as a symbol. So maybe these are, you know, it's difficult to prove yet, but the stories are being traced further and further back in time. It's possible that it was conveying some kind of warning to the young women who came from the farming villages in Europe before the arrival of the first Indo-Europeans, because not to tangle with these dangerous men coming from the east. That's amazing. You also got Red Riding Hood there as well. So we talked about Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood and all of them. No, but it's fascinating to think that those, you know, you can trace origins of those back thousands of years. Forgive me if this is another question, but I'm fascinated by this idea of the travelling as well. And let's say a certain Indo-European group travels into the lands of another group, and they are a non-Indo-European group. But of course, they've brought their stories with them. And there's a clear linguistic barrier between the two. I mean, What happens to stories in those cases? Can you then see those stories be transmitted over time into a non-Indo-European group and vice versa? So that's a really good point.

You get this borrowing of stories and you can imagine some of the social factors that might have affected that. For example, you're invited to a feast. You want to get in with the new people who are throwing the feast. You share appreciation for their story and maybe you start telling the same story yourself. It's a way of sharing people's identity is telling the same story. But yes, you're absolutely right. This new type of evolutionary approach to understanding stories and language suggests that language barriers throw out huge obstacles to the spread of stories,

or at least slow them down. So you get stories sort of diffusing across landscapes, you know, being borrowed from, say, one village to the next, one community to the next, especially amongst nomadic peoples who travel and move through other communities a lot. When they come up against a sort of very hard cultural boundary or even perhaps a geographical boundary or a linguistic boundary specifically. It might not stop it entirely.

The story might traverse and go across, but it's harder for it to do so. But I think it's important to say at some point that, you know, we're talking about, when we go right back to 5,000 years, we're talking about people who had no literary culture, of course they didn't write their languages down. They were the first Indo-Europeans

because we think very nomadic, very mobile in the landscape. and they were separated from each other. Clans would have been separated as they moved with their animals for long periods of time and over large swathes of space. So telling stories was absolutely key

to giving them a sense of social identity, to keeping them together, to giving them a sense of community and who they were. And so it was very, very important, perhaps more important than we understand today where we think of stories as just as a form of entertainment.

Do you think that endurance of stories through one of the biggest shifts in kind of human nature, when they go from hunter gathering to settling down and farming and staying in one area of the world. Do you think it's testament to how important these stories were that rather than many of these stories then fading from existence, like if it's a new way of life they've adopted, that they remain as popular as ever, but maybe their purpose changes? I think that's absolutely right. And that goes back to what we were talking about initially,

about stories having more than one function, right? I mean, above all, we would like our stories to be entertaining. Let's not forget that. And so, for example, there's one school of thought, which is that, again, coming from this evolutionary approach, where people have tried to understand what is it about stories that stays stable, because we know they change all the time. So if we could understand what is it that is the sort of through thread, then maybe we will get a better idea of what they're doing for us.

And actually, people have had trouble identifying that through thread. One idea, for example, was that it was horror, because many of the older fairy tales that we tell, for example, in Europe are very gruesome and horrible. I mean, you know, there's an Italian version of Little Red Riding Hood where she's served up some tortellini and the tortellini turned out to be her grandmother's ears and then she served some wine and it turns out to be her grandmother's blood, right? And when the Grim brothers and Perrault, in fact, wrote these stories down, they ironically tended to sanitize them.

Whereas, you know, one idea is that maybe their function was to instill fear in people in a way that they didn't have to expose themselves to danger, but they could understand what fear felt like, so perhaps they would in future avoid dangerous situations. Not everybody agrees with that. It might not be about the horror. It could be about the information. It could be about the bonding,

and it could be a little bit of everything. I also have another question, and this is kind of harkling back to a couple of previous episodes I've done in the past on this podcast, and maybe it's a bit more of an extreme example in regards to the geographic locations. But I remember doing an interview a couple of years back about Indigenous Australian Astronomy.

and how they identified a certain star constellation as a hunter in their own stories, and they have this wonderful story about the hunter and how it links to this constellation. And then our guest he pointed out that actually it's exactly the same constellation as the ancient Greeks developed the story of Orion, the hunter in the stars. And it just made me think, these are two completely different cultures, two completely different parts of the world and yet existing at similar times, And they've come to the same conclusion about, you know, this particular celestial constellation in the sky above them.

And you just think, why and how does that happen? Is it simply coincidence? It's so fascinating, isn't it? I mean, okay, first thing to say is that probably forever human beings have looked up at the sky and wondered what those twinkly things are, right? And that's a universal experience. So again, we come to this, you know, problem that you have to distinguish what people would have arrived at independently from what they might have borrowed from each other

or inherited. There's an Austrian poet called Ralph Schrot, who wrote a book. I think it came out just earlier this year. And he talks about his idea. He's collected sort of star-themed myths and tales from around the world. And he has this idea, which I find fascinating. The idea is that the people who left Africa 60,000 years ago, might have been the ones who knew how to steer by the stars or who learned to pretty quickly because otherwise I would have got lost. And so they're the ones who started telling stories about the stars, all left with those stories, and already were paying attention to the stars, particularly more than their compatriots, let's say. And then they carried those stories around the world. So that's why

you find some of the similar stories told by Indigenous Australians and continents apart. But yes, and the Indigenous Australians are fascinating for some of the age of the stories they tell as well. So there's very recent work, which shows, because they have this very strong oral tradition. People have looked at some of the stories they tell and they've noticed that, for example, those stories describe coastlines of Australia that don't exist anymore because the coast vanished as the sea rose at the end of the last ice age. So if they're describing a coastline that predated the melting of the ice and the rising of the sea, they must have been telling those stories for at least 7,000 years, which is fascinating. There's this notion that

storytelling, whatever the function is, it is a very important function because in those oral traditions, there's a very strong emphasis often on conservatism, on not getting too creative, right? You can integrate new information if it's valuable, but people are very, people police their storytelling quite fiercely, and if people get too creative and stray from the one, the version they know, they get cross and tell them off. But I guess that shows the importance of these stories to these communities over thousands of years. The fact that they are more than just stories, they're important to the community, they're important to their way of life and what they believed in. And if they retold those stories differently to what was canon in a world before

writing, I mean, that could have severe consequences down the line as well. So I guess that policing idea you can understand it. Absolutely. This idea of not throwing the essential parts, but at the same time integrating information that might be useful as the context changes around you. But But that's a collective decision very often, right? The storyteller is not allowed to just go off on a tangent wherever he or she like. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on echoes of history, we uncover the epic.

epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed, not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I mean, how prestigious do you think these storytellers would have been in hunter-gatherer societies?

I guess down into the time of the farming communities in the early cities as well, with myths and legends retain their importance, but surely they held prime importance in these societies. Usually, they were skilled artisans who were as valued as carpenters or wagon makers or metal workers who were, by way, usually valued in those hunter-gatherers societies and still are today. And I think that's a universal thing. It's certainly not peculiarly Indo-European, but in the Indo-European tradition, which I've studied, I know that they were, for example, in the Celtic tradition, they were often brought into the King's court, handsomely rewarded for them. their effort with horses and jewels and all kinds of precious metals and things, and often ennobled themselves, and that often those families, the storytelling skills were transmitted down from father to son very often. And there are, for example, Irish families still today,

which are known as those Bardic families of old. Wow. There you go. Laura, before we completely wrap up, I'd like to also ask about conspiracy theories today. Well, they're sometimes described as modern myths. In what ways do they serve the same purpose as traditional folk tales or religious stories? I mean, there is a sort of rather vague distinction between myths, legends and folk tales, right? And a myth tends to be something that isn't necessarily grounded in fact or any sort of known historical episode. But what it does for us is it explains the world in some way. It helps us to, you know, understand the world as we say it around us. The creation myth, Indo-European creation myth that we described earlier is an example of that. So very often what

it's doing is explaining why things are the way they are when we don't have the, say, scientific knowledge to provide an alternative explanation. I think conspiracy theories are considered by many people who work in this kind of field as modern myths, as in they are not legends which tend to have some grounding in historical fact. They're not fairy tales. I don't necessarily have that sort of fantastical, magical element of fairy tales. But they do do something for us, which is what myths do, including creationists, which is explain the world. So when people are afraid, when they don't understand why things are the way they are, they reach for myths and conspiracy theories may be filling that niche for us in the modern world. There's really no good

evidence. People might find this hard to believe, but there's no really good convincing evidence that they're more common now than they ever were. It's just that they're perhaps more visible because of social media. I completely agree. And I'm on record saying this in the past as well, that people say, oh, do you worry about the rise of conspiracy theorists today? And I completely share what you say there, Laura. It is just the fact that they're more visible today because of social media. It's not actually that they're more popular than they have been before in proportion to the rest of the population. It is just because with the technology we have today, they are more at the forefront. But there have always been people who, especially with less technology available,

who could well have believed stories which we'd have seen as conspiracy theories, you know, throughout history. I entirely agree. I would just say that I think also it depends a little bit on the sort of emotional context. So if you're living through a turbulent time, which arguably we are, you know, there might be some sort of greater, a higher level of, I don't know, existential fear amongst people, which means they're more likely to reach for a conspiracy theory as a sort of, you know, comfort blanket in a way. And if they're all in display, you've got your pallet of conspiracy theories out there on social media to choose from, it might make it a little bit easier to tip that way, let's say.

A couple more questions to finish off, Laura. You have recently released a wonderful book, Proto, exploring the origins of Indo-European. We've done an episode on the birth of Indo-European. Almost to summarize, how can we therefore say how language ties into the way that myths are created, then they are preserved and transmitted? So if I'm to summarize the thrust of this new kind of chapter of research into these things, it's that very often, but not always languages and myths travel together, myths can be hugely illuminating about the culture that produced them because they echo some of the social conventions and beliefs of those people. So in a way they throw open a window on the past, but they're also hugely fluid and dynamic.

And so they reflect in another way the encounters that those people made, the mixing of cultures and the hybridisation that has gone on in humans, biologic, being culturally, since the beginning. And so what do you think that these particular myths, the ones that have their origins thousands of years ago, what do you think they can tell us about us today? I think they tell us that we need explanations for things at the most basic level. We need an explanation. We need things to make sense. And we like to have an idea that nothing happens for no reason. nothing is random. We love to impose agency on events. So if something happens and it's scary,

we love to impute that to some kind of evil spirit or force, some kind of enemy. If something good happens, it's because we've got some fairy godmother looking over us, rather than some random concatenation of circumstances, which is in a way for us as human beings, I think it's almost the scariest. I hate to say it, but does it almost sound like a common thread with some of these myths is then almost for the person to avoid responsibility for something that's happened? Well, yes, I suppose that you could say that if it was random as well, but to blame someone else. Or to credit someone else because, you know, maybe the thing is good that's happening to you. Well, that's it. Exactly. So you're either blaming or crediting something

else rather than this idea of agency. There's somebody intentional did it or something intentional did it. This has been fascinating. My background in linguistics is zilch. So it's always wonderful getting you on the podcast and to learn more about this stuff. Last but certainly not least, your recent book, all about this and so much more, it is called. Proto, how one ancient language went global. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Thank you. It was lovely to chat. Well, there you go. There was Laura Spinney returning to the show, talking through the origins of these incredible stories and how far back they stretch the origins.

of mythology with the birth of Indo-European languages and probably before that as well. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I've got a feeling it's going to have a pretty big and good reception. Thank you for listening to the episode. Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of history hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at history hit.com slash subscribe.

That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.