‘Descent with Imagination: Evolution in Oral Tradition’. Cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and linguists have become increasingly interested in understanding what happens to information that gets repeatedly transmitted from person to person, and from generation to generation. What kinds of features remain stable, what kinds get distorted, and how? So far, most research into these questions has been carried out in the lab, for instance through iterated learning/transmission chain type experiments. In this talk I discuss how they might be addressed using the folklore record. Like other orally-transmitted stories, folktales represent natural transmission chains that stretch across generations and regions. I demonstrate how phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to study the evolution and diversification of biological organisms can be used to reconstruct these traditions, and shed light on the cognitive and cultural factors that stabilise and/or modify them. I argue that this approach – “evolutionary folklore”, if you will – complements experimental approaches to cultural transmission and discuss some areas where the two could be usefully combined.