Origins of Mythology

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. MORE The Birth of Indo-European https://open.spotify.com/episode/2OSBoNA7godfxbLZEn3VUp?si=EZ2NbPQQSCuWOEO7BMiFnQ With thanks to the authors of the Proto-Indo European reconstructions Riccardo 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 Myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBGYC_UKM54 Dragon-Slaying Myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1SXeSHY9p0 Presented 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 Sounds The 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 https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:07Tristan Hughes?

  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 hoarse 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.

• 1:51Tristan Hughes?

  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 clamoring 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.

• 2:21Tristan Hughes?

  I've got a hunch this one's going to be popular. Anyway, that's enough from me. Let's go.

• 2:40Tristan Hughes?

  Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, 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.

• 3:23Tristan Hughes?

  This is the fascinating story of the origins of mythology with our guest Laura Spinney.

• 3:32Tristan Hughes?

  Laura, welcome back. It's great to have you back on the podcast.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  It's lovely to be back.

• 3:36Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  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. Okay. But yeah, so 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.

• 4:11Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Well, that is a huge and knotty question in itself. And one of the-

• 4:22Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry, sorry one to start off with.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  It's huge and it's very, very exciting in a way. Why do we do it? Why, why can we almost not help ourselves doing it? And 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, certain elements of stories are. And that is leading to new thinking about why stories persist, you know, if 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.

• 5:04Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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.

• 5:45Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  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

• 6:48Speaker 02

  have the same sort of synchronized brain 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.

• 7:05Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, the flood idea, yes.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Exactly. So people might not live through such a thing in their own lifetimes, but they need to know there's a risk there.

• 7:12Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  It's a really good question. So I think, you know, heroes' journeys of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, you could 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

• 8:15Speaker 02

  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, overcomes 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.

• 8:37Tristan Hughes?

  And so what are the other key story archetypes that we have?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  The idea of seven basic plots is a little bit of an urban myth. I suppose it goes back to a book about twenty 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.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  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 plot forms is what he was talking about. And I think experts are dubious about this, but are there ideas which are shared across storytelling traditions and that reflects universal human experiences for sure?

• 9:25Tristan Hughes?

  Now let's get into the fun, I guess, sciency 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?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so it all does start with linguistics in a way. Many of the people who study myths and 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, you know, 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 evolutionary 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 folktales, which allow us to compare them and to compare them across,

• 10:29Speaker 02

  you know, very widely spaced cultures in time and in the world geographically. And so what it boils down to is 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 four hundred 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 steppes around five thousand years ago. Likewise, with myths, you can compare the basic elements of myths.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  We called the the smallest unit rather like a gene in biology, in a myth it would be a mytheme. 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 histories 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.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:09Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  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 recognise 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.

• 12:53Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  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 Tairani, 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,

• 13:35Speaker 02

  perhaps five to six thousand years, to when the first Indo-European speakers came into Europe. From the steppe, they undertook these huge journeys coming west. Their languages will give rise to many of the Indo-European 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 backwoods 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.

• 14:14Tristan Hughes?

  So you have similarities between the Brothers Grimm and their collection of fairy tale stories and research doing today. That's incredible.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  An interesting thing about the Grimm 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 Scandinavians' 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 have been turned into Disney films, et cetera.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Some of those stories now, again with techniques that people like Jamie Tirani 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 Rumpelstiltskin or Beauty and the Beast might be 4,000 years old, might have been told by some of the earliest Indo-European speakers in Europe, if not the very first.

• 15:28Tristan Hughes?

  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 recognise and see, see the clear similarities.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it would probably be quite a strange experience because you would recognise 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 recognise and, 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's, it would have been a bit like that with the stories as well.

• 16:35Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So for example, they did one deep dive, the same group, Jamie Tirani and his colleagues, into Cinderella, the story of Cinderella, the rags to riches 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 rags to riches idea. And it might, might have been something that we were all familiar with and

• 17:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:02Tristan Hughes?

  I've had the story of Cinderella. And you mentioned earlier, Rumplestiltskin 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 with you, our listeners.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is a linguist called Ricardo Ginevra, who's based in Milan, and Andrew Byrd, 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 Indo-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.

• 18:42Tristan Hughes?

  We absolutely are. So let's start with the first one, the creation myth.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Me mon hatod, hyod nequid est.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  I remember it when nothing was.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Ne tegum est, ne tius upperi, ne dubrum odor est, ne srevont es capes.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Earth was not, nor heaven above; deep water was not, nor flowing waters.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Ne guictis est, ne entratos mortis.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Life was not, nor inescapable death; sun was not, nor moon in the sky; no stars, nor night, nor day.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  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. 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?

• 20:17Tristan Hughes?

  So there was Phil Barnett with the creation myth. I mean, Laura, talk to us about this myth and what we know.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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, it's there in the Italic tradition, think of Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  And it's also there in the Asian branches of the Indo-European family, so in the languages that 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.

• 21:25Tristan Hughes?

  It's astonishing. It's astonishing to hear that. And, 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, to reconstruct the myths, but also the language in which they would have been spoken. And it's amazing.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  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 Two. 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, 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.

• 22:12Tristan Hughes?

  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, you know, with the one we've just talked about with Proto-European thousands of years ago?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  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, you know, for the last 20 years, we've been able to extract DNA from ancient human remains and analyse 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.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:45Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's go on to the second story now before we explore a bit more about that kind of travelling element of this, which is also really important. But the second myth that we do have reconstructed is the dragon slaying myth.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  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 him, 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.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  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 Siegfried. Or Esfandiar in the Persian traditions, or in the Homeric traditions, this idea of people dying for eternal glory.

• 25:02Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's have a listen to it in the original language.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Me mon chaton, ntarqtoom t'hantham.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  I remember him, the undefeated thunderer.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Hios kietrum tarhuti, hium puthus degom berit, heguint hogui.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  He who defeats enemies, he the broad earth bore, he killed the serpent.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Sohnu spa tres di wes puthaoskwe t'hameskonto.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  A son was born from far the sky and broad earth, thunderer by name. He drinks mead with the immortal gods. He has protected men and livestock, the two-footed and four-footed, 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-footed. The thunderer escaped and received the hammer from the fashioner. He killed the serpent.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Heguint hogui.

• 26:19Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  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, et cetera, et cetera. 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, you know, 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.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  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 work 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 slayer tale has even older roots, that it might have come out of Africa and that people, when they first migrated, you know, sixty thousand years ago and people the rest of the world, that they took this concept of a dangerous reptile with them, because of course there are dangerous snakes in Africa. And we know that there are stories told in parts of the world that don't even have snakes.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  For example, in, you know, in cold Alaska, where there are no snakes, they tell about a great sea monster called a Paul Rayuk. So is that an idea that came out of Africa? It's mind blowing to think it might have been. But, you know, 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.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 29:28Speaker 05

  I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 30:17Tristan Hughes?

  One of my favorite artifacts from the Ice Age, I believe there's now a bit of a debate about the date, but it's always put about forty to thirty-five thousand years ago, is this upright lion, the Lervenmensch, 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 environments, like mountain lions, cave lions, and so on,

• 31:00Tristan Hughes?

  were a key part of their mythology from, well, right from the get-go?

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So, for example, in the Black Sea region, which is where the Indian European language was probably spoken, we know that there were still lions prowling and all sorts of other dangerous animals, including wild cows called oryx, 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.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  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 lived.

• 32:02Tristan Hughes?

  Going back to what you mentioned earlier, this idea that, you know, people travelled 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?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  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 as transferring survival information.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And, you know, we do know that, for example, take Little Red Riding Hood, one of the stories that Charles Perrault first wrote down in the 17th century of Frenchment, so a hundred years or so before the Grimm 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 like that of Jamie Terrania, 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 Perrault 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

• 33:47Speaker 02

  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 warbands, groups of young roving warriors, who themselves

• 34:27Speaker 02

  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-European speakers, not to tangle with these dangerous men coming from the east.

• 34:50Tristan Hughes?

  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. So forgive me if this is another simple 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?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  That's a really good point. You 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 show appreciation for their story and maybe you start telling the same story yourself. You know, it's a it's a way of sharing people's identity is, you know, telling the same stories. But yes, you're absolutely right. This new type of evolutionary approach to understanding stories in language suggests that language barriers throw up 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

• 36:12Speaker 02

  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

• 36:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:10Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  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

• 38:17Speaker 02

  version of Little Red Riding Hood, where she's served up some tortellini, and the tortellini turn 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 Grimm 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.

• 38:56Tristan Hughes?

  I also have another question, and this is kind of harkening 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

• 39:37Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  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 Ral Schrott, 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 sixty thousand years ago

• 40:34Speaker 02

  might have been the ones who knew how to steer by the stars, or who learned to pretty quickly, because otherwise they would have got lost. And so they're the ones who started telling stories about the stars, or 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

• 41:14Speaker 02

  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 seven thousand 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.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And if people get too creative and stray from the one, the version they know, they get cross and tell them off.

• 42:02Tristan Hughes?

  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 you severe consequences down the line as well. Well, so I guess that policing idea, you can understand it.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's 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 that's a collective decision very often, right? The storyteller is not allowed to just go off on a tangent wherever he or she likes.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 44:25Tristan Hughes?

  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 and the early cities as well, if myths and legends retain their importance, but surely they held prime importance in these societies?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Usually, they were skilled artisans who were as valued as carpenters or wagon makers or metalworkers, who were, by the way, hugely valued in those hunter-gatherer 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 their efforts 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.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  And there are, for example, Irish families still today, which are known as those bardic families of old.

• 45:29Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, there you go. Laura, before we completely wrap up, I'd like to also ask about conspiracy theories today, rather sometimes described as modern myths. In what ways do they serve the same purpose as traditional folktales or religious stories?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  I mean, there is a sort of rather vague distinction between myths, legends and folktales, 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 see it around us. The creation myth, the 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

• 46:27Speaker 02

  as modern myths, as in they are not legends, which tend to have some grounding in historical fact. And they're not fairy tales. They 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 creation myths, 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.

• 47:04Tristan Hughes?

  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 I 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, if like 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've, especially with less technology available, who could well have believed stories which we'd have seen as conspiracy theories, you know, throughout history.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  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, higher level of, I don't know, existential fear amongst people, which means they're more likely to reach for conspiracy theory as a sort of, you know, comfort blanket in a way. And if they're all in display, you've got your palette 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.

• 48:09Tristan Hughes?

  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 summarise, how can we therefore say how a language ties into the way that myths are created, then they are preserved and transmitted?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  So if I'm to summarise 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, biologically and culturally since the beginning.

• 49:05Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 49:15Speaker 02

  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. You know, 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 no way for us as human beings, I think, is almost the scariest.

• 49:53Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Uh, well, yes, I suppose that you could say that if it was random as well, but to blame someone else.

• 50:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Or to credit someone else, because, you know, maybe, maybe the thing is good that's happening to you.

• 50:13Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's it. Exactly. So you're either blaming or crediting something else rather than.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  This idea of agency. There's somebody intentional did it, or something intentional did it.

• 50:21Tristan Hughes?

  Laura, 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?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global.

• 50:36Tristan Hughes?

  It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Thank you. It was lovely to chat.

• 50:46Tristan Hughes?

  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. 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, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 51:31Tristan Hughes?

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

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalised AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.