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R682 Current Biology 28, R679–R694, June 18, 2018 © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. Silva from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Jamshid Tehrani from Durham University, UK, have recently shown that, among dozens of folk tales that share ancient roots in Indo-European cultures, at least one arises from the common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European (R. Soc. Open Sci. (2016) 3, 150645). Graça da Silva and Tehrani used the Bayesian analysis mentioned above to establish a phylogeny of folk tales involving magic that are found in different Indo-European traditions. To distinguish between vertical transmission through historical time and horizontal spread between neighbours they relied on Atkinson and colleagues’ phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages as a proxy for cultural inheritance. They discovered strong phylogenetic connections in dozens of common types of folk tales, mostly reaching back to the major branches of Indo-European. For instance, the authors report that the essential content of Beauty and the Beast as well as Rumplestiltskin harks back to the early days of Western Indo-European languages, so they may have come to Europe with the Yamnaya expansion. One type of tale, ‘the smith and the devil’, is found both in European and South Asian branches of IndoEuropean cultures, and the authors say they can show with confi dence that its root is in the common ancestral culture that spoke Proto-Indo-European. As the smith required in this tale proves the knowledge of metallurgy in the culture of its origin, this fi nding supports the Bronze-Age localisation of PIE in the steppe rather than the early agriculture link in Anatolia, where metallurgy was as yet unknown at the time when agriculture started to spread. Intriguingly, premonitions of this wide-ranging connection between Indo-European cultures are as old as the study of their linguistic relationship. Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), in the preface of an edition of the traditional German tales he famously collected with his brother Jacob (1785–1863), expressed his conviction that these tales were part of an ancient IndoEuropean oral tradition. Now, with the methods of ancient DNA and statistical analyses, scientists can show that Grimm’s hunch was true to fact and the genetic, linguistic and cultural connections ranging from the south of Asia to the north of Europe are due to a shared family tree likely rooted in the Pontic Steppe, and not just fairy tales.