Researchers traced human history by comparing Little Red Riding Hood with a similar tale, The Wolf and the Kids.
"This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species," Doctor Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University, said.
Tehrani believes The Wolf and the Kids was made up in the first century AD, and Little Red Riding Hood branched off from that original story 1,000 years later.
The Wolf and the Kids is told mainly in the Middle East and Europe. In the story a wolf pretends to be a "nanny goat" and eats children, in Little Red Riding Hood a wolf impersonates a girl's grandmother before devouring her. The story varies throughout cultures, such as The Tiger Grandmother, which is popular in Japan.
A well-known version of Little Red Riding Hood was written by the Brothers Grimm about 200 years ago, but that was based off of a 17th century, story written by Charles Perrault in France. Before that an oral version of the story was believed to have circulated through "France, Austria and northern Italy."
Tehrani used phylogenetic analysis ("a method more commonly used by biologists for grouping together closely-related organisms to form a tree of life diagram") to identify 58 variants of the tales.
"This exemplifies a process biologists call convergent evolution, in which species independently evolve similar adaptations. The fact that Little Red Riding Hood 'evolved twice' from the same starting point suggests it holds a powerful appeal that attracts our imaginations," Tehrani said.
The analysis used 72 plot variables such as characteristics of the protagonist and villain.
"There is a popular theory that an archaic, ancestral version of Little Red Riding Hood originated in Chinese oral tradition. It is claimed the tale spread west, along the Silk Route, and gave rise to both The Wolf and the Kids and the modern version of Little Red Riding Hood. My analysis demonstrates that in fact the Chinese version is derived from European oral traditions, and not vice versa," Tehrani said.
Tehrani believes the Chinese combined Little Red Riding Hood andThe Wolf and the Kids with other local folk-tales in order to create a "hybrid" version of the story, which was recorded by Chinese poet Huang Zhing in the 17th century.
"This implies that the Chinese version is not derived from literary versions of Little Red Riding Hood but from the older, oral version, with which it shares crucial similarities. It is therefore understandable that previous scholars have assumed it to be ancestral to the European tale - but actually it's the other way around," Tehrani said.
