Jack And The Beanstalk Could Be 5,000 Years Old

Popular fairy tales such as Jack And The Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin could date back thousands of years to prehistoric times, according to academics. Researchers used a tree of Indo-European languages and phylogenetic analysis, traditionally employed to study evolutionary relationships between species, to trace the stories' origins back in time. They found that folk tales are not only passed on 'vertically' from ancestral populations to their descendants, but also spread 'horizontally' between