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Iron age men left home to join wives’ families, DNA study suggests
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Like... all of them? What is this headline trying to imply?
You should read the article. It's not that long, and how they figured this out is interesting.
I would but I believe journalists should be accountable to write accurate and succinct headlines, anything less would be condoning clickbait
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!
Lol gottem
Slammed him really.
Howsabout just putting the word "Some" at the start, to remove all ambiguity?
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.
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
Clickbait is "you'll never believe why these men from the iron age moved in with their..."
Generally something is left out and intentionally worded to make you curious.
A regular headline is meant to convey a single sentence summary, not necessarily covering the why.
Journalists don't write headlines for the most part, editors do. If you think the headline is bad you should email the newspaper, not the journalist, because they probably have no control over it.
And expecting a headline to be both succinct and completely explain the story is an unreasonable expectation. That's why the article is there, to explain what the headline doesn't. Despite what reddit and Twitter would have you believe, browsing a bunch of headlines is not reading the news.
Editors were once journalists, so I would expect them to keep with the standards, unless they got the job through fraud or nepotism
“Summarize all the details of the article in the headline so that reading the article is unnecessary” is not an editorial standard held by any newspapers, to my knowledge.
Your use of quotation marks implies that you're quoting me. Please point to where I said, "Summarize all the details of the article in the headline so that reading the article is unnecessary”
Or perhaps you're acting in bad faith? I believe that may have been a strawman dark pattern you've just used.
Oh, you’re a debate pervert, not someone having a conversation. Kind of on me for not seeing that before now. Don’t worry about it, man. We’re done now.
Insults, now?
It's okay, I forgive you.
I'm not going to lambast you, but I will point out that reading only headlines is why Alex Jones still has a job and has been able to effectively lie for 30 years.
The article is really easy to understand, and it has details that wouldn't fit or would otherwise be missing context in a headline. I really do recommend reading it. Plus, learning is fun!
So, to be honest, I did read the article, but it's still important to hold journalism to professional standards, lest we regress towards the dumb.
What standards is this headline guilty of violating?
It says what the article will be about, which is what headlines are for.
Just the standard about hurting my feelings online. Don't they know that gives me gas? It's a good thing I was on the toilet while reading it, or as the kids say, "Yeeting the kids to the pool, yolo". So the gas was actually helpful as a propellant. For my butt.
No, this headline is perfectly good. It's got all the key details. The extra details would make the headline too long.
What does too long mean? Are we rationing attention spans now?
There are character limits. And conventions.
The article has the details. The headline describes what will be in the article. For this article, it works.
The word "some" at the beginning of the headline would have been a perfectly acceptable qualification of the phrase which also would've better described the actual findings of the study.
I disagree. It doesn't say "all". "Some" is kind of meaningless because it implies it's something that has happened ever. Like most things within the realm of possibility.
Not having the qualifier implies it's a trend -- neither a certainty nor a rarity.
I don't even disagree that it's a fine headline, but this community shits its pants everytime an article isn't extremely accurate in it's headline, so it's funny to suddenly have an army of people descent upon this comment section to defend specifically this one.
"Some" would be more useful in this instance, as it would distinguish it from the general case. That's pretty standard behaviour for news headlines too, right? This study does not concern itself with iron age populations in general but specifically celtic communities between 100 BC and 100 AD in Britain.
Who would understand it to mean "every single man" just because it doesn't explicitly say "some"? That would be a pretty strange way to read it.
I never implied that it would mean "every single man". That's a pretty strange way to read my comment.
How the hell would you know unless you read the article?
Because I am actually a genie, and have foreknowledge on everything ever written. You can ask me anything, but they count as wishes and you've already used one.
No response.
You're not a very good genie then.
hahahahaha!!!
What are you talking about click bait? Nobody got slammed.
You're right. In my home country of Canuckistan, every headline must mention someone "slamming" someone else. I believe that term to be linguistic appropiation, however, because the textbook definiton of "slamming", when I was a fresh budding leaf, meant, "to fuck, hardddddd"
It barely implies anything except "men" meaning at least two.
If only they started the headline with "Some" and removed all ambiguity
It shouldn't say "Some", it should say "British" because if you read the article this seems to be a trend across British iron age communities.
But Britishers weren't around back then, time travellers notwithstanding, because the land wasn't Britain yet. Furthermore, using "British" in place of "Some" would mitigate the problem but not solve it- owing to that the implication is that the set of Iron Age men were not homogenous. Reducing them to a subset, regardless of the name, still implies that the subset, now, is homogenous. No homo.
So not trying to argue, just have a genuine conversation. Talking from an American perspective, British implies the British Isles (place) to me and not the people (who I honestly have no idea when they lived or currently live there??). I'm not familiar with any other name for the isles (again speaking as an American).
Also, I think (or hope) that most people would understand and any research into the Iron Age is only showing a survival bias that may not indicate the whole population in an area. However, I think it's fair to state that if you see a trend across multiple sites in roughly the same time period, it indicates a larger cultural practice in that area because we are only seeing a small amount of surving evidence. For this reason, I think "some" is too broad.