Image copyright PA Image caption The Brothers Grimm correctly believed the stories they popularised went back further than earliest literary records, academics said 
 
 'Biology toolkit' 
 
 The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, employed phylogenetic methods to investigate the relationships between population histories and cultural phenomena, such as languages, marriage practices, political institutions, material culture and music. 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. Forgotten fairytales slay the Cinderella stereotype | Philip Oltermann Read more 
 
 The story, which involves a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the devil in order to gain supernatural ability, then tricking the evil power, is not so well known today, but its theme of a Faustian pact is familiar to many. Study of fairy story origins traces some back thousands of years, with one tale dating back as far as bronze age 
 
 Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed. It’s not clear that the term “smith” even existed, he argued, which casts doubt on the claim that “The Smith and the Devil” is as old and significant as Tehrani and da Silva say.
– Many traditional fairy tales, long thought to be a somewhat recent invention, have actually been around for thousands of years, according to a new study. "Versions of Beauty and the Beast, Rumplestiltskin, and Jack and the Beanstalk have probably been around since before the existence of many modern European languages, like English, German, Russian, and French, and would have originally been told in a now extinct ancestral language from which those tongues evolved," co-author Jamshid Tehrani of Durham University tells Discovery News. He estimates that some such tales pre-date the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, having been in existence as many as 4,000 to 6,000 years, and may have actually influenced the Bible and other religious texts. Generally, fairy tales have been believed to date back to just the 16th or 17th centuries, though the Brothers Grimm long believed the stories they transcribed and popularized were actually much older, the BBC reports. "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm," Tehrani tells the BBC. "Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record." Tehrani, an anthropologist, and fellow researcher Sara Graça da Silva, a folklorist, used phylogenetic methods more commonly used by biologists to come to their conclusions. Discovery reports they looked at 275 Indo-European fairy tales, narrowing those down to 76 that had likely been passed down through a closely-related group and mapping those onto a "family tree" of Indo-European languages in order to trace them back to a common ancestor. By analyzing common languages and geographical proximity, the Guardian reports, the researchers determined how far back they could trace the tales. The stories we know today evolved, much like humans, the Washington Post explains, and the tree showed that evolution. Jack and the Beanstalk, for example, is part of a group of stories the researchers called "The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure," which can be traced back 5,000 years to when there was a language split, according to the Guardian. (Another recent study has bad news for Cinderella.)