ArticlePloS one2013
The phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Autonomous language-image generation loops converge to generic visual motifs.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- How oral traditions develop: a cautionary tale on cultural evolution from the Quechuan-speaking Andes.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2025Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Creativity as emulation: the cultural basis of creative cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Stories in Action.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic reconciliation.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Extracting hierarchical features of cultural variation using network-based clustering.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- A new phylogenetic protocol: dealing with model misspecification and confirmation bias in molecular phylogenetics.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2020Article
- High-fidelity copying is not necessarily the key to cumulative cultural evolution: a study in monkeys and children.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and books.PloS one · 2019Article
- Differential loss of components of traditional ecological knowledge following a primate extinction event.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The evolution of an ancient technology.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Ancestral Reconstruction.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- The structure and evolution of story networks.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2016Review
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1 author.
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Abstract
Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the 'historic-geographic' school, it is possible to classify similar tales into "international types" and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, 'Little Red Riding Hood'. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU 123, 'The Wolf and the Kids'. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic, Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics of the historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They further suggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved by blending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods provide a powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards exciting new directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives.
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