Folklore incorporates themes beyond time and space, and stories often include anthropomorphic representations of animals and creatures that do not exist in the real world. While such myths may seem limited by imagination only, not all themes are universal and cognitive constraints still apply.
In a fantastical study of mythical creatures, researchers focused on a specific character in zoological folklore: the trickster, a character type that performs tricks and deceptions or exhibits mischievous behaviours, such as stealing and cheating. Using a global database of myths that includes 3,000 unique motifs categorized by properties and indexed by geographic coordinates, they identified 16 potential trickster animals (e.g., badgers, mice, raccoons and rabbits) which they included in their analysis.
The authors downloaded GBIF-mediated occurrences of trickster-matched taxa and created a global hexagonal grid of 842 cells that coded the presence of both real-life and mythical tricksters. By applying data on annual mean temperature and precipitation, they also assigned a biome class to each hex cell.
Initial analysis showed that the distributions of 12 of the 16 real animals were constrained by climate, constraints that were less evident for trickster animals' distributions. But by calculating distribution probabilities, the authors showed that the presence of real animals was an almost necessary condition for the presence of trickster animals.
The study demonstrates how ecological and climatic conditions have dominant effects on contents in folklore. While rabbits and raccoons may lie and steal, their presence in myths somehow remains limited to their local distributional ranges.