Crecganford follows folklore, stories of myth, legend, and folktale, back through the evidence — historical linguistics, archaeogenetics, archaeology and the phylogenetics of narrative — to ask how far our stories really reach, and what they remember.
A University of Iowa study in Science Advances reports that a tiny set of ancient gene-regulatory regions, some shared with Neanderthals, has an outsized influence on present-day language ability.
Read articleA Yale-led study in Science analysed 177 high-coverage genomes from 12 Near Oceanian populations alongside 1,284 worldwide genomes. The researchers report evidence for ancestry from at least three Denisovan-related groups and identify thousands of archaic variants that affect gene expression.
Read articleA HistoGenes study in Science sequenced more than 300 genomes from northwestern Hungary, charting a shift from cosmopolitan Roman-era ancestry to greater northern European ancestry in post-Roman communities.
Read article
Excavations at the Neolithic settlement of Vráble in southwestern Slovakia uncovered headless skeletons in an enclosure ditch, including paired burials and a mass deposit of at least 77 individuals.
Read articleIn Nature Communications, researchers report that permafrost-preserved Arctic ground squirrel coprolites in Yukon retain ancient environmental DNA spanning the Holocene to roughly 700,000 years ago.
Read articleResearchers report in Quaternary that red lines in Bacon Hole cave, dismissed as mineral staining in 1912, are deliberate Paleolithic markings dated to around 17,100 years ago—the oldest known rock art in the British Isles.
Read articleGeological analysis and ice-sheet modelling indicate Stonehenge's six-tonne Altar Stone came from northeast Scotland, around 700 km away, and that Neolithic people, not glaciers, moved it.
Read articleThe Folklore Database unites the Berezkin Analytical Catalogue, the ATU index, and hundreds of thousands of folktales and primary source religious/mythological texts into a single research instrument. It delivers semantic and geospatial search on narratives, allowing the full database to be searchable by meaning as well as by word, and mapped across the globe.
Open the database
Crecganford is the name the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives to Crayford, where in AD 457 history and legend meet on the banks of the Cray — a fitting name for a project that works exactly at that boundary.
Run by an independent researcher in comparative mythology and folklore, Crecganford brings academic rigour to questions usually left to speculation: where stories come from, how they travel, and how deep in time their roots may run. The work draws on the published literature in folkloristics, historical linguistics, archaeogenetics and archaeology, and is shared through the YouTube channel, this site, and the Folklore Database.
If you value careful, evidenced storytelling about storytelling itself, the best ways to support the project are to subscribe, share, and join the community on Patreon.