An Interview With Dr Jamie Tehrani On The Origins Of Fairy Tales

In this episode, we talk with Dr Jamie Tehrani of Durham University about his research into the origins of fairy tales.

In his 2016 paper, co-authored with Sara Graça da Silva, they took phylogenetic modeling techniques - borrowed from the world of evolutionary biology where they're used to trace genetic lineages - and put them to work tracing the origins of folk tales.

The results seemed to prove that many fairy tale narratives can indeed be traced back several thousand years. But how exactly do these methods work? And can they really prove the existence of stories before the invention of writing?

We'd read the news articles and had a go at reading the paper, but we still didn't understand exactly how it worked. Fortunately, Dr Tehrani graciously offered up his time to explain how it was done. And we round things off with a fantastic story: The King And The Bishop.

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