Tag: folktale

New monograph on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (in Russian)

tale-igor-svyat-campaign

Sergej Nikolaev has published a new monograph on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (you should download and open it in a PDF viewer to view some special characters correctly):

Слово о полку Игореве»: реконструкция стихотворного текста, by С.Л. Николаев (2018).

Abstract (in Russian).

Текст «Слова о полку Игореве» (далее «Слово») дошел до нас в двух неточных (отредактированных) копиях со списка нач. XVI в. и нескольких выписках из него. Наслоения, привнесенные переписчиком нач. XVI в. (или несколькими переписчиками) – редактура в русле 2 го южнославянского влияния и поздние диалектизмы – непоследовательны (§9.3.1) и не настолько исказили стихотворный текст рубежа XII–XIII

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Storytelling was a source for cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies before religion

A new article, Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling, by Smith et al., Nature Communications (2017).

Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a

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Spread of Indo-European folktale traditions related to cultural and demic diffusion (using genomic data)

folktale-genomics

New article at PNAS, Inferring patterns of folktale diffusion using genomic data, by Bortoloni et al. (2017).

Abstract:

Observable patterns of cultural variation are consistently intertwined with demic movements, cultural diffusion, and adaptation to different ecological contexts [Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach; Boyd and Richerson (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process]. The quantitative study of gene–culture coevolution has focused in particular on the mechanisms responsible for change in frequency and attributes of cultural traits, the spread of cultural information through demic and cultural diffusion, and detecting relationships between genetic and cultural lineages. Here,

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