• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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    22 hours ago

    You’re right, the headline should clearly have read:

    “Based on a DNA study conducted by Dr. Laura Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin and others, assumptions that most iron age Celtic societies were patrilocal have not borne out genetically, which shows that potentially there are time periods where matrilocality is more common, changing views of how women in ancient societies are viewed by modern people studying them, but this is all still early days as the paper has just been published in the science journal known as Nature and the peer review process still has to run its course. And even then, sometimes peer-reviewed science gets overturned, so we can’t actually be sure any of this is true until a time machine is invented, which physicists currently think is not a practical possibility (although we haven’t surveyed 100% of them on this).”

    There. Accurate. Hmm… not all that succinct though.

    I guess they should have gone with the title of the paper in Nature: “Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain”

    Everyone would have understood it!

    • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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      20 hours ago

      It’s doesn’t have slam in there though. Im not sure who to blame.

    • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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      19 hours ago

      Howsabout just putting the word “Some” at the start, to remove all ambiguity?

      • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 hours ago

        Is that sentence structure ambiguous?

        If you said “Iron Age men fought with Iron Swords” you wouldn’t say that statement is clearly false because it’s not true of all iron age men.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        8 hours ago

        Because people can figure that out by a combination of using a bit of common sense and reading the article in any doubt. And I say “people” even though there’s at least one person who can’t, and people will understand anyway.

        • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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          4 hours ago

          It’s not well and good to assume that common sense is a real thing, seeing the amount of maroons congregating since the proliferation of the Internet. People are easily led, misled, outraged or cowed. Case in point, Flat Earthers