The BBC.com has an interesting story on the ancient origins of fairy tales titled “Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say.” The story tells of the research at the Universities of Durham and Lisbon that reveals that some basic fairy tale ideas go back quite some time:

Using techniques normally employed by biologists, academics studied links between stories from around the world and found some had prehistoric roots.
They found some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age.

The stories had been thought to date back to the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, said Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago.

Analysis showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old.

And a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.

These findings are significant in helping connect the stories to the early history of human civilization. Fairy tales are not only found in ancient childrens’ stories, but also find their way into contemporary fantasy, horror and science fiction. For an exploration of fairy tale connections to horror see my past interview with Walter Rankin on his book Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films. Read the BBC.com story here.